What Do BigLaw Associates Actually Do?

You hear the term "BigLaw" thrown around in pre-law circles like everyone already knows what it means. You know the firms are big. You know the money is good. But what do people actually do all day? If you have ever wondered what happens after someone accepts that offer letter and walks into a 40-story office building on their first Monday, this is for you.

The two tracks: litigation and transactional

When you start at a big law firm, you will generally land in one of two buckets: litigation or transactional. Some firms let you rotate through both during your first year before committing. Others ask you to pick a lane before you even show up.

Litigation is the side of the law most people picture. Courtrooms, arguments, disputes. One company is suing another, or the government is investigating a client, or two parties can not agree on a contract and need a court to sort it out. The goal is to win (or settle) a case.

Transactional work is the other side. No courtrooms. Transactional associates work on deals: mergers and acquisitions, financing, IPOs, private equity transactions. The goal is to get a deal closed.

Both are demanding. Both require sharp writing and serious attention to detail. But the day-to-day looks very different.

What transactional associates do

As a first-year on a transactional team, your life will revolve around three things: due diligence, document drafting, and deal closings.

Due diligence sounds intimidating but is actually straightforward. When one company is buying another, the buyer needs to understand exactly what it is purchasing. Think of it like a home inspection, except instead of checking the roof, you are reviewing thousands of contracts, corporate filings, tax records, employment agreements, and regulatory permits. Your job is to go through these documents carefully and flag anything that looks wrong or risky. You log your findings in a memo, and a senior associate or partner reviews your work.

Document drafting is the other major piece. You help draft and revise purchase agreements, merger agreements, credit agreements, and all the documents that surround a deal. As a junior associate, you are working from templates and precedent, making revisions based on the deal's specific terms. Over time, you take on more responsibility for negotiating and turning comments from the other side.

Closings are the finish line, and they can be exhausting. Signatures need to be collected, funds wired, filings made, conditions checked off. You might be up until 3 a.m. chasing a missing signature from a board member in Tokyo.

Day-to-day, transactional work is less about dramatic legal arguments and more about precision, organization, and responsiveness. You are often working on multiple deals at once, and things move fast.

What litigation associates do

On the litigation side, your early years will center on legal research, drafting motions, document review, and depositions.

Legal research is exactly what it sounds like. A partner asks you to research whether a particular contract clause is enforceable under Delaware law, and you spend a day or two pulling cases, reading them carefully, and writing a memo summarizing your findings. Good research memos shape the arguments the team makes in court.

Drafting motions is where research turns into action. A motion is a formal written request asking the court to do something: dismiss the case, compel the other side to produce documents, exclude certain evidence. Junior associates draft sections of motions; senior associates and partners polish them. As you get more experience, you draft entire briefs on your own.

Discovery is the phase of a lawsuit where both sides exchange information. This means reviewing thousands (sometimes millions) of documents that the other side has produced, looking for evidence that helps your client. It is not glamorous, but it is where cases are often won or lost. The associate who finds the smoking-gun email buried in 50,000 documents is the hero of the case.

Depositions are sworn, out-of-court interviews where a lawyer questions a witness on the record. As a junior associate, you attend, help prepare witnesses, and organize transcripts afterward. As you gain experience, you take depositions yourself. It is one of the more nerve-wracking and rewarding parts of the job.

Litigation tends to have more variation in pacing. Some weeks are quiet. Other weeks are a sprint to a court-imposed filing deadline, and you are at the office until midnight every night.

The hours

The hours in BigLaw are long. Most associates bill between 1,800 and 2,200 hours per year, and billing 2,000 hours means actually working closer to 2,500 when you count non-billable time (emails, trainings, admin, pro bono). That is roughly 50 to 70 hours in a typical week, with spikes to 80 or more when a deal is closing or a brief is due.

But not every week is an 80-hour week. The intensity ebbs and flows. You might have a brutal two-week stretch followed by a relatively calm week where you leave at 6. It depends on your practice group, your firm, your partners, and the market cycle. Capital markets associates are slammed when IPO activity is hot. M&A associates are busy when deal volume is high. Litigation associates can have quiet stretches between major deadlines.

The trade-off is real: the firms with the most demanding hours tend to have the best work and the highest compensation.

BigLaw placement rates by school

Not every law school sends the same share of its class into BigLaw. Your school's ranking has a real impact on your odds.

At Columbia or Chicago, BigLaw is the default outcome. At a T25 school, it is achievable but competitive. You typically need to be in the top third and have law review. Below T50, you generally need to be near the top of your class, and grades carry disproportionate weight.

This does not mean you cannot get to BigLaw from a lower-ranked school. People do it every year. But the path is harder and the margin for error is smaller.

Is it worth it?

The honest answer: it depends on what you want out of it.

The compensation is extraordinary. First-year associates at Cravath-scale firms earn $225,000 base, plus a year-end bonus that pushes total compensation above $240,000. By year three, over $280,000. By year five, over $350,000. No other entry-level job for a 25-year-old with a professional degree comes close.

The training is also excellent. BigLaw exposes you to sophisticated, high-stakes work from day one. You learn how deals are structured, how billion-dollar disputes are litigated, and how to write and think under pressure. That training follows you for the rest of your career no matter where you end up.

And most people do not stay forever. The median BigLaw associate tenure is somewhere around two to four years. Many leave for in-house roles, government (DOJ, SEC, state AG offices), or entirely different paths. BigLaw, for most people, is a chapter, not the whole book.

If you go in with open eyes and a sense of what you want to get out of it, it can be one of the most valuable career moves you make. The pay erases law school debt fast. The resume signal opens doors for decades. And the skills (writing under pressure, managing complexity, working with demanding clients) transfer to almost anything.

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