Why you should never do litigation or regulatory

You will never become partner and,if you do, you will be 20PQE at Wimbledon Bond Dicks.

 

 

 

- HS and other U.K. firms make up on average internally around 15 PQE, if they ever do

- lateral partners have had to partner at a third rate firm for 5-20 years before coming onboard 

funds or M&A or finance you can make partner after 7 PQE easy

They advise on regulatory issues relating to commercial transactions

It is really dull but what you find is that a lot of them convinced themselves they are “fun tech” lawyers. They spent most of their downtime talking about Marcus and Revolut and Bitcoin, and then come into the office bright eyed and optimistic for FCA form filling and to advise on AIFMD and MiFID

Contentious regulatory - i.e. regulatory enforcement - is far from dull.  Lawyers on the commercial litigation side often worry their efforts only really move money around, with nobody losing their jobs or actually feeling any personal peril. If you use the same skills in relation to a regulatory enforcement investigation against, say, a CEO or CFO by the FCA or similar then you find they quite quickly start talking about the impact on their health and future prospects, they rely on your expertise and feel ill-equipped to handle the unknown territory, and they recognise that their leadership skills and modus operandi in the workplace is going to be largely useless for getting it all sorted out. They become vulnerable. They a dependent on your skill and doing well for them genuinely delivers a benefit to them and their loved ones. It is rewarding and demanding and the opposition is very good at doing a pretty bad job which means you often have a lot to work with, so the job moves through the spectrum of investigations, regulatory procedure, public law and litigation.  .  

It's a great leveller. Your Chairman or CEO no longer seems quite the muscular fellow he or she was last week when they have endured a day or two's interview and then receive a decision notice. You get to talk to them on a human level about what makes a credible response, where there professional and personal vulnerabilities lie, how they actually appear (versus what they intended). You also enjoy the forensic evidence sifting business, if you like that (I have always felt this was a core lawyer skill and am sceptical of those who think it is a nothing). Plus the law and procedure is not straightforward and keeps shifting with politics, so you don't get stale. 

Compare this with a chap I once met who worked for Thomas Cooper Stibbard and had spent his entire career doing the Factortame cases. No other work ever then retired.  Or with the M&A fellows in the MC who have sold, bought, resold, rebought, resold the British energy industry or water utilities or the train network.  I am sure it was fascinating.

Entire career on Factortame?

I would rather be parachuted into Afghanistan in a rainbow tshirt, high heels, arse-less leather chaps and a tattoo on my forehead saying "PRONOUNS: THEY/ THEM".

And yet, I bet he was a total beer monster.

Contentious regulatory is basically disputes / white collar, not advisory reg to investment firms and banks like I meant

contentious regulatory is awful and horrendous

All associates do is doc review

tens of thousands of pages of doc review

and then they summarise the docs, produce a chronology, write some back and forth letters to the regulator and hope charges aren’t pressed 

half the time these letters basically say well this is just how business is done in dodgy Arab state / Russia. Bribe?? Noooo...everyone pays each other for information and doing things for other people, it’s a cultural practice. Heh at this being a worthwhile endeavour.

And interviews. Going door to door in the company, reading off a script and then summarising the interview back which will go into a report which will sit in a drawer so when the regulator says what did u do; well we investigated in these reports and found ourselves jnnocent of all wrongdoing 

 

urgh

 

tbf rail franchise work is also as full as fvck. probably quite a bit duller. 

transactional work was the only fun bit of law; mainly because there wasn’t much law involved 

Regulatory lawyers think they’re at the heart of the business but while they’re navel gazing and pontificating about what the rules say or should say the business just cracks on.

Litigation lawyers are crying inside at the futility of their existence.

To be fair, it is all crap; it is about arguing which is relatively less crap.

first there’s a point where people say ooooh I love my practice area of x in big law, could never have done anything else. Dude. It sucks. The hours are crap. You are doing doc review at 40. You are proofing a junior’s memo and adding comments. It’s the same crap whatever.

second, and more importantly, it all doesn’t matter. It has no purpose. Litigation is pointless as is everything transactional.

what matters really is career progression and partnership.

If you look at Laz, for example, he was a perpetual associate (in a terrible practice area), he left law four times and slowed his career progression so much he became a salaried at a mid market firm offshore in his 40s. And he wonders why it sucks quite so much.

you need to be in a firm after 3-5 PQE which has good partnership prospects in your area. 
 

in an area like litigation, people just don’t get made up. There is no business case. One serious strategy is to get to senior associate at a White&Case or Debevoise, and then try to get partnership at 7PQE by a boutique or a lower mid market firm where you’ll earn about 120k (really), but you’ll be salaried partner.

BUT then it’s super hard to get equity.

whereas if you are originating business, you can get made up and equity within a short span of time

i see litigators on average get made up closer to 15PQE nowadays. Around 2005, it was closer to 7, now it’s basically at least doubled.

meanwhile 6-7 is readily achievable in transactional areas

and all you then have to do is build the relationships and the team, and manage the client relationships, barely ever having to do any legal work 

The Goose29 Jul 21 18:12

Heh @ transactional work being “fun”.

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have to agree

talking to the same 3 banks for 40 years about the same minor amendments to the repeating warranties while slogging 18 hour days as a glorified spell checker on the client's latest change to the key personnel section of an offering memorandum doesn't sound overly rewarding or indeed anything you remain sharp and/or sane doing

Georg Simmel29 Jul 21 20:43

you need to be in a firm after 3-5 PQE which has good partnership prospects in your area. 

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why?

so you can do twice as much work because now you've budgets and managing people to add to your to do list while everyone else in the building is trying to push you out of the way and the doddering old fooks at the top who pulled up the ladder think they had it tough when all you had to do was mutter some latin into a dictaphone and knock off to the club

kinda feels like you're getting tricked by the business

sorta like one of those greyhounds chasing a fake rabbit around a track

Sumo - no, you have the team run itself; I am abroad in a different timezone to everyone at the moment, and I am spending on average 4 hours a day reviewing their work, and associated emails, making very limited changes and doing very little real work but jumping on a few calls.

The point is you cannot be a perpetual associate. You have to aspire to me at some point.

and laz still has all the tax - it’s not Cayman or UAE, it works out marginally better than the U.K. after accommodation and cost of living is taken into account

Georg Simmel29 Jul 21 21:13

Sumo - no, you have the team run itself

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ah okay

you're in a joke shop document mill with one of those "it's the relationship not what you know" type of jurisdictions

the wibbling makes sense now

That’s what firms like SH, OC, RPC, 2Birds pay - 120-150. Not Shoosmiths.

silver and transatlantic is 180-200k

look at where senior associates at debs end up

boutiques vary wildly but a new partner will be on around 120-160.

 

You can’t senior associate forever. Most US firms will not make up internals up, and will chuck you after you become too expensive; it’s just a ticking clock

Everybody gangsta until the FCA comes a knocking...

I don't that sort of work very often, but have worked with some very impressive partners who are just brilliant when their clients are being interviewed by regulators.  The best ones are incredibly incisive and forensic.  A lot of the more junior work is fooking shite though. Lots of sifting through IM chat logs and emails. 

Jesus Christ, imagine having clients that actually receive a decision notice from the FCA.

and then pretending to be proud you were their lawyer.

The OP nailed this FFS.

Relatively senior regulatory lawyer here.  My group does competition, product compliance/recalls, sanctions, trade, public enquiries, contentious and advisory public law, health and safety, environment, medical devices and pharmaceuticals, EU (REACH etc), customs and import, 'Brexit' and various other things too.

Most of the senior team (SAs, directors and partners) have strong experience in at least a couple of those areas and we encourage the juniors and trainees to work across them all. 

I personally don't find it boring at all.  I think we do 'proper law' for our own clients and on most days I'm faced with something new.

Each to their own and all that, but I can't imagine doing something like M&A, funds or civil lit even if, for some of them, there might be a better path to partnership.

 

Relatively senior regulatory lawyer here.  My group does competition, product compliance/recalls, sanctions, trade, public enquiries, contentious and advisory public law, health and safety, environment, medical devices and pharmaceuticals, EU (REACH etc), customs and import, 'Brexit' and various other things too.

That's what I though OP meant, but some are having a pop at FS Reg lawyers. Both are noble callings that are doing pretty well at the moment. 

Well some reg roles can be pretty tedious - a lot of reg lawyers are FCA form fillers who read off their website for a living.

With that being said, I usually don't pop at reg because it's relatively more interesting than some things, and when you're bored of PP, you can at least become GC at some PSP and have a relatively stress free lifestyle, if you want that.

I have friends at Big 4 legal as partners and they are generally content, although I earn their annual salary in just over 2 months or so - I basically outearn six years' worth of their effort for one year of mine esp when you take into account their six years' of living costs. Although I am offshore.

I'm genuinely going to retire in the next 3-5 years and have hobby property businesses.

Well some reg roles can be pretty tedious - a lot of reg lawyers are FCA form fillers who read off their website for a living.

Ouch. 

With that being said, I usually don't pop at reg because it's relatively more interesting than some things, and when you're bored of PP, you can at least become GC at some PSP and have a relatively stress free lifestyle, if you want that.

Pretty much. 

"I'm genuinely going to retire in the next 3-5 years and have hobby property businessesdescend into loneliness and auto-erotic asphyxiation"

 

Fixed that for you :)