Law Students

No formal vacation means, well, no formal vacation

By Peg

Recently, as I was contemplating taking a couple of days off work when the school year ends for my kids in June and I got to remembering when I first started as a biglaw associate.  In a session on one of the first days, we met with junior associates who were supposed to answer all of our questions that we didn't want to ask in more formal sessions.  Quickly the question came up about how to ask for vacation days and I remember the others that I was starting with being almost giddy about the fact that there wasn't any formal approval process and that we didn't need permission to take time off and even that it didn't seem like anyone was keeping track of it.  I also remember being a little relieved that it didn't seem like vacation had to be something that one planned far in advance and didn't need to be coordinated with the entire office.  Afterall, it seemed nice that you could take vacation whenever your work scheduled allowed.  Ha!-- what a misnomer that whole idea is.  See, the schedule of a junior associate in a national law firm, will never allow vacation.  Instead, one has to force vacation into a riduculously busy work load and take it regardless of whether you have time to take it or not  -- or not take it at all, an option that many see to go for.

Also, I have come to learn that the fact that vacation is very informal for attorneys means, exactly that -- it is informal.  The truth is that vacation in general is a very loose concept.  I've tried to take a grand total of 4 vacation days since the beginning of this calendar year and have actually only been able to take 1 vacation day where I didn't work, although I was not in the office for the other three.

I was reminded of this today when reading a post on The Glass Hammer.

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Full post as published by Ms. JD on May 20, 2008 (boomark / email).