The City can seriously damage your family life, says ex-magic circle trainee Dominic Webb

I took a lot from my training with a magic circle firm. I made a lot of close friends, left on good terms with my colleagues, and for those who are wondering, was made an offer to qualify there. In short, I have no axe to grind.

Nevertheless, during my time in the City I noticed many things about the culture of the big law firms that I perceived to be negative, particularly from the point of view of an employee. Those things ultimately resulted in my leaving corporate law for good.

It seems that a lawyer in the big firms has virtually no escape. It's not just that any given evening or weekend might be ruined, but that the important ones might be ruined. Even in the run up to holidays you face the possibility that your holiday might be cancelled (in truth this happens pretty rarely, but the fact that it happens at all is enough to make you aware of the threat). Everyone expects to work long hours when they join a big firm, but the 24/7 all-encompassing nature of City law firm life is difficult to properly appreciate – until you actually live through it.

I knew an associate who had a young family – a wife and a child just one month old. A nice guy, he was clearly a committed family man. He was extremely efficient at his work so that he could leave the office in good time to support his wife and newborn baby. After all, they both needed him around. Surely his employer should bear this in mind?

You can probably guess where the story goes from here. The partners in his department (he was not a transactional lawyer) put him on their element of an absolutely enormous transaction – big even by magic circle standards. It was clear from the outset that everybody on it would be working crazy hours, and so it proved. He spent a whole month – the second month of his child's life – working until late every evening and both days at the weekend. He barely saw his wife or his baby for that whole time.

I thought this was plain wrong. What planet were the partners on? How could they give so little thought to the welfare of a liked and respected employee, and those who depended on him? It is one thing to ask someone to work very hard, but this was something else.

I concluded that I didn't want to live like that. Among my intake, I was far from alone.

So, to what extent is it justifiable for law firms to expect their employees to put work above everything else in their lives, no matter how unreasonable the demands? The experience of that associate would almost certainly not occur in the 'real world'. Does the very good money that City lawyers are paid really give employers carte blanche to demand whatever they want from them?

Perhaps, you might say, the answer is simple. If you can't stand the heat, get out of the kitchen.

Fine, so be it. But in return I'll show you loads of good, young, highly-trained lawyers just waiting for an economic upturn so that they can get 'out of the kitchen' themselves. For those big firms, that has to be a problem worth addressing.

Dominic Webb (name changed) is a solicitor at a private client firm.

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