Gen Y Lawyers

San Francisco magazine has a recent story about the different career paths of Gen Y lawyers who began their legal careers in large law firms, only to move on to more flexible and innovative practice settings after a few years.  The article includes this sobering sentence:

In order to hit 2,200 hours, a person has to be on the job from 8:00 a.m. to 8:00 p.m. every weekday and seven hours on Saturday twice a month, with three weeks of total time off a year.

Of course, this figure assumes that you'll be able to bill a good chunk of the time that you spend in the office.  But we all know that a day in the typical law firm associate's life includes some unavoidable non-billable hours, like practice group meetings, CLE lunches, summer associate activities, and client development projects and meetings, so that three weeks off sounds mighty optimistic to me!

For those of you who are graduating soon and interested in pursuing a less traditional legal career, this article is an excellent read.