Prostitute It's a lot like being a lawyer, but the income is tax-free and there are no student loans.
I also hear you don't have to bill your time in 15 minute increments... well, at least not necessarily.
To add to general lawyer comments: You'll get fed the piece of shit files from higher up the chain. That's nothing new or unexpected. However, you can guarantee that a predominant part of those will be flat-fee files that have been negotiated on tender; for the lowest possible amount. You'll then be expected to meet budget, which will be impossible. To cope with this, you'll work 12 hour days so that you can get to some files that you can charge time on (and possibly start padding your time costing on those if you're unethical). Regardless of this, you'll have to face the monthly writeoffs committees and explain why there's a ton of your time being written off on the flat-fee files. This will be a dog and pony show which will be ultimately used against you if they want to fire your ass - the partners reviewing your performance know exactly what's going on. In-house legal counsel: - The upside is that there's no more clients. The downside is, you work for your client. - In a law firm, you'll generally have specific types of matters you do. As an in-house, you need to be able to do everything. Stating that you need to refer a matter to a specialist outside lawyer will get you looked at as if you have two heads. - You're treated more like a pet rottweiler with attack training than a staff member. - Anyone in the company with a traffic violation, problem with the dvd rental provider, issues with their dead uncle's estate or any other thing they can think of will hang around your office trying to get free advice all day. Some will want to push the issue and get you to do some legal work for them, and then get disgruntled when you explain that you can only provide legal services to the company - which does not extend to them. - The greater legal fraternity, regulators and courts will fail to recognise you as a legal practitioner (I've had one judge refer to me as a "so-called lawyer"). That sort of derision should be reserved for free legal practice crusaders. - You rarely, if ever, create anything. Most of your time is spent putting out the fires created by the idiots who don't follow company procedure. Accordingly, you're not really seen as a valuable asset to the company. Rather, you're considered a drain on the company. - The majority of your advice will be ignored. It will be considered "uncommercial","too conservative", "too restrictive", "too hard to implement" or "unnecessary". You will then be expected to clean up the mess created because your advice turned out to be sound, and criticised because it actually can't be fixed and that's why it was conservative in the first place.