Exit strategies?

For the first time since I have been doing this kind of work, I am hearing people talk about exit strategies. I don't mean finding another law job -- people always talk about that. In the past, though, people were willing to keep working in Temp Town because the money was good. But that was when the rate was $5 an hour higher than it is now, and 60-hour projects were the norm. There weren't any jobs short of associate at a big firm that paid that much, and nobody in Temp Town was landing an associate job. They either already had and for whatever reason lost it, or they never were going to land one. Sorry, hard fact, end of story. So, good money, low stress, lots of work, what's not to like?

Two of those three elements have largely disappeared. The money is no longer good -- a 15 percent drop in base pay is not part of the roadmap to prosperity. Neither is the complete disappearance of overtime, which is what always made this work lucrative to begin with. Occasionally projects will offer 10 hours of overtime, but it is becoming increasingly rare. The old days, when projects with 80, 90 or 100 hours a week were not common but nowhere near unheard of, are gone. So now what?

Well, people are talking about getting out. They're not sure where they would go or what they would do, but most are talking about leaving the area and leaving the legal profession (to the extent Temp Town actually is part of the legal profession.)

I think that might be premature, but it is hard to fault people for thinking that way. I plan to hang in for a few months, as I believe that there will be a lot more merger activity if Obama is not re-elected. Four years ago, I thought that merger activity would drop off, but be replaced by federal investigations of varying sorts. Alas, Barry's boys never really demonstrated the competence to generate investuigations in the volume that would keep our industry going. Spare me the ideological arguments, the cold facts are these: merger activity died, and investigations did not replace mergers as the prime source of work.

I think mergers will make a comeback if Romney wins, but I know a lot of people are not betting on it. The new business model seems to be more bodies, fewer hours. I recently was offered a project and when I asked about the hours, the response was, "Are you kidding? Nobody pays overtime anymore."

That's not quite true, but it's close enough. The question, then, is this: Will overtime as a routine matter ever return? I don't know.