A survey of trainees and junior lawyers at American law firms’ offices in London shows that they spend as much as 13 hours a day at work—roughly twice the average work week in the U.K.
That comes with a lifestyle of Deliveroo dinners and picking up calls at “ungodly hours or on days off,” an anonymous employee told Legal Cheek, a legal news site that surveyed 2,000 workers across London’s various law firms, in November.
“I haven’t seen sunlight in three months,” said another anonymous employee.
Yet another participant said that although vacation time was respected, they were always expected to answer work calls.
Yes, all the tropes that shows, like Suits, make you believe about how long and hard law firms work their new staff work, might just be true.
While it has the trappings of a toxic work culture people would try to avoid, working long hours at law firms comes with handsome pay. Starting salaries in the top firms are over £170,000, or nearly five times the U.K.’s median income in 2023.
The likes of Kirkland and Ellis and Paul Hastings, American law firms with practices in London, pay £172,000 and demand an average of 12 to 13 hours a day, The Times reported. In contrast, British firms make employees work slightly shorter on average while capping starting pay at £150,000.
To be sure, not every firm in the industry has brutally long hours in exchange for a six-figure paycheck. Several of the firms listed by Legal Cheek in its survey limit their workday to 9 hours or so for freshly qualified solicitors.
Still, that’s a far cry from the average workweek in the U.K., which spans 36.6 hours or 7.3 hours a day.
Billable hours are the metric law firms often use to measure the performance of their lawyers. In some cases, those hours tick up to 2,000 a year. The U.S. demands a higher number of hours on average compared to Britain.
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However, the model has been controversial amid cost pressures and demands for a more transparent system. Lawyers also argue that there could be more efficient ways to do the same work without a billable hours structure that determines pay. With AI’s emergence into public consciousness, the legal profession is already beginning to change.
That hasn’t hit hiring momentum, at least at the top level. London’s top law firms hired partners at record speed in 2024, driven by American law firms’ appetite to compete for talent in the British capital.
Part of the appeal for fresh talent at U.S.-based firms is the high pay they can swing relative to British ones. The most esteemed law firms are rethinking their partner pay structure in response to the growing competition.
“The impact of the covetous New Yorker on the highest levels of the London legal services market over such a short period has been profound,” a report by recruiting firm Edward Gibson said in July.
A version of this story was originally published on Fortune.com on Nov. 5, 2024.
