Pros
I worked as a litigator. Pros include: - Compensation at significantly above-market rates for my area (Florida). - Opportunity to work on complex, engaging, and significant legal matters. - The firm's name carries a lot of weight on your resume when seeking subsequent employment. I believe I only received the subsequent opportunities I did because of the "biglaw" experience I could demonstrate from having GT on my resume. - Almost all of the people working at the office were likeable. To the extent they might have been rough around the edges, it seemed mostly due to the chronic, negative impact of the very demanding nature of the work, not due to the nature of their character. - The firm definitely prides itself on diversity, and that was real. I never got the slightest sense of barriers or animosity to women or minorities. The firm seemed to reward only one thing - professional success - regardless of other attributes. That said, I would not consider myself a minority, and so I might not be privy to everything that could happen on that front.
Cons
- For me, meeting the firm's minimum expectations required a total commitment to the job--above family, friends, and all else. I hung on there for several years (motivated in large part by the fact that the compensation seemed so good), and when I had to leave, it was (from my perspective) because my family could no longer suffer the neglect of them required by the job, which also caused a kind of collective burnout. Lawyers who consider themselves good at working smarter and not harder will likely have a better experience than I did in this respect. After having a kid, my regular weekday schedule had me getting up at 2 AM or 3 AM so that I could be in the office working by 4 AM. That was the only way I could get enough work done to leave the office by 5:30 PM, as needed for childcare, and my "early" departure was still a bit controversial, from time to time. I was billing around 1,900 to 2,000 hours per year, I think. - For what it is worth, I am not aware of any attorney at my office who had attained the status of partner while shouldering primary childcare responsibilities. Indeed, there seemed to be a noticeable correlation between the extent of a partner's childcare responsibilities and his or her level of professional success at the firm. The older a partner's kids were, or the more time their spouse devoted to childcare, the more highly the partner seemed to perform. I knew of only one partner who left the office every day at 5 PM to pick up her very young kids from school, and another partner once commented that the reason no other attorneys had a problem with that was only because she made herself absolutely 100% available for work at every other time of the day, including late nights remotely. Also, conspicuously, her husband was a homemaker (e.g., stay-at-home dad), which is not a luxury most women enjoy. This issue is probably a problem with the legal field generally, though, and not just with Greenberg Traurig. Perhaps a problem with corporate America more broadly. It was not the result of any animus, just a natural consequence of the demands of the work. - The other associate attorneys are some of the most motivated and intelligent people I have ever worked with. Obviously, that is good, but it can also be very challenging to keep up with a group like that. - It seems hard to make partner considering the billable hour requirements for associates. There seemed to be few elevations to partner each year. Most partners seemed to come into the firm from lateral transfers. I am not sure how you can do the kind of networking that will get you clients while meeting those billable requirements. This may be a problem with "biglaw" more generally, not just GT.