Whose Life Is Harder: Lawyers or Investment Bankers?

....Not that it's a competition, or even if it were, a prize that one should be proud to win.

But if you're working in an investment bank or a city law firm in Malaysia, you may sometimes (if not, regularly) feel that you're pulling hours that are well above what would be considered normal, or working in conditions that just make you question your existence. Perhaps you:

• don't ever have time to eat lunch, dinner or feed yourself in general;

• Uber home because you're too tired to drive your car after work, at 2am in the morning;

• look forward to going into a deep sleep coma on the weekends (if you're not at work then too); and / or

• haven't seen your housemates / family / pets in weeks.

We quizzed a few lawyers and investment bankers on exactly how long their workdays are, and how bad their lives can really get.

1. Investment Bankers

Banks are known to run like well-oiled machines - and this isn't limited to just frontline staff who service you at a bank branch. Corporate teams often function similarly too.

"We've got to be in by 9 am; 9:30 am at the latest", shares one investment banker at a local Malaysian bank, pretty much disregarding how late you might have worked the night before.

Some banks also implement pecuniary penalties and fines for latecomers. Staff may have to fork out up to RM10 per day that they come in past the stipulated starting time for the work day. Some banks might cap it at RM 50, or not at all. The money, however, usually goes into the collective fund for department lunches or teambuilding activities.

"On average I work until about 9 or 10pm each day, and work weekends about half of the time".

While, unlike law firms, investment bankers don't have time-based, billable targets, based on working 12 hours each day for 5 days per week and occassionally working 8 - 12 hours on weekends, some investment bankers can end up spending between 3,000 to 3,360 hours at work each year.

But of course, not all that time is spent doing cutting-edge work. At junior levels, this can be anything from sorting out documents to formatting lines on a powerpoint. At senior levels, one could be reviewing, strategising and waiting for turnarounds from juniors and clients.

"I've pretty much had to forego personal plans with friends and family many times because I was waiting for a counter-party on a deal to revert with their comments, even when there was no indication whether or not they would be responding on a given day. The job requires me to be on standby so that I'm not the one who's holding up the transaction", shares one M&A investment banker.

2. Lawyers

The nature of the legal profession has traditionally been to bill clients based on the number of hours a lawyer has worked on a client's project (granted, this is changing with the advent of techno-legal solutions and service providers).

In many law firms in Malaysia, lawyers are still operating based on revenue collection targets or billable hour targets.

"While I have an hourly, billable rate, I don't have to keep a timesheet nor does the firm charge clients on a pure time-cost basis", shares one Associate, "but I am expected to collect a certain amount of revenue each year which then has an impact on my annual bonus, increment and promotion prospects". On this basis, you could either be pulling lots of hours on many small deals to get volume to hit your targets, or you could be pulling long hours on a single deal.

Another lawyer shares that he does in fact have a target for billable time to be incurred each year, on top of having a collections target. "The firm sets a target of 1,800 billable hours each year" he shares. Thus in a given year, between 6 - 7 hours per work day needs to be billable, client work, before taking into account any public holidays or leave time off.

"I usually get in at around 10am, and leave anytime between 8pm to midnight depending on the time of year and project flow. On top of billable work, there's also a lot of administrative work like billing, collections, continuing professional development and practice group organisation that needs to be done - all of which is not taken into account when looking at billable hours".

With that, many lawyers can spend anywhere from 10 to 12 hours at work each working day, resulting in 2,600 to 3,120 hours per year, before taking into account the occasional all-nighter and working weekends.

Not too different from life as an investment banker, one corporate lawyer shares: "sometimes when I am in the middle of a transaction, I feel guilty or worried about going to bed even when it's midnight, because my boss might email me instructions or the other side might send me their comments. If I'm asleep, I'll only be able to respond in the morning and may get in trouble for being slow or 'dropping the ball'. Sometimes I wake up frantically at 2am to see if any emails have come in for me".

3. So What Now?

The fact is that service oriented industries like legal and banking are competitive - good business is often contingent on giving clients a great experience, and there are many other players in the market, who are waiting in the wings to pounce, if one fails to do so.

While this may sometimes be punitive on employees, it's important to remember that it's not personal - it's symptomatic of the industry, and something that others are trying to cope with too.

Of course, a lot of different factors come into play in looking at working hours and conditions. Some people are naturally more efficient than others, sometimes workload may not be distributed evenly or fairly. Sometimes you may find yourself at work for hours on end because of someone else's mismanagement.

But amidst all the choas, find ways to relax and unwind - whether it's disconnecting completely on the weekends, being clearer in your instructions to your subordinates so that you can build a better team environment, and not allowing yourself to become engulfed in madness and jumping the gun everytime a client or your boss so much as breathes (you'd be surprised how much this can reduce unnecessary work load, so step up to ask questions, seek clarification and manage everyone's expectations when need be).

While you may not be able to change your work conditions entirely, the most important thing is to find ways to guard against your own burn out, and also avoid being a contributing factor towards someone else's.

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Are you working in the legal profession or in banking? Tell us about your job and find out what others are sharing about theirs.

Image sources: makeameme.org, memegenerator.net, emecrunch.com