Sales.
Tuesday, December 4th, 2007
anon,
If you got a job in technology sales — for example, doing C-level executive sales for Oracle, you would be able to make considerably more money, and you would see oh so much more about how the world really works, while also being able to make “rain” right away.
The idea of “salesman” seems so repulsive to those who have been trained that success if wearing a nave cashmere coat and an upper tier Brooks suit, etc.
But you have been so terribly lied to if you believe this.
In fact, at the very top of law firms and investment banks, the highest paid work of all is, guess what?
Sales.
But in a law firm, they are going to try to keep you away from this as long as they possibly can, because that is “their” rain, not yours.
They’ll make the “client relationship” seem very mysterious indeed.
Well, guess what. It ain’t.
It’s about sales, which you can learn in a thousand different ways, EXCEPT at a law firm, where every partner has massive incentives to keep you from learning it.
Think about it.
Your life is worth it, and those partners’ lives are grotesquely overcompensated due to their having built an associate-yoke-based (leveraged) revenue model.
Comment by - October 29, 2007 at 6:37 pm
Baaaahhh is right. On it’s face, $200,000 sounds like a nice payday. Unfortunately, these smart lawyers (including those at Cravath) have fallen for the foolish trap that their TIME is money. That’s flat-out wrong. Time is not money. Money is money. You’ll never get rich charging by the hour. You need to leverage your money. These insanely intelligent lawyers (of which I am regretfully one) are too uninspired, uncreative, and skill-less to go out and make a real contribution to society (i.e., doctor, teacher, social worker, financier) and instead think they are God’s gift to the world because they spend their days cleaning up other people’s sh*t.
At the end of the day, lawyers at Cravath, and all the other white shoe firms, think they are rich and important, when in fact they are neither.
Comment by - October 29, 2007 at 7:00 pm
Man, you guys are crazy. All of your criticisms of the legal profession could apply to any number of a million other jobs. People go to Cravath to work for one of the best law firms and to get trained to be a better lawyer. There are worse things.
Comment by - October 29, 2007 at 7:06 pm