Last fall I started seeing an icon for the TV show Suits when I’d fire up Netflix. The icon was eye-appealing enough for me to make a note to myself to look into the show details.
In the meantime, I met someone who’d watched the show. She explained that it’s about a buncha lawyers in a large law firm, and covers cases the lawyers handle, and life inside the law firm. Having spent most of my professional career working in and with somewhat similar law firms, I was immediately sold.
As I soon thereafter discovered, Suits wasn’t a Netflix original program. In fact, it was a series that ran for nine seasons (on USA network) and had ended its run a few years before. Way to go, me, I thought. So blind to popular culture that I completely missed any mention of the show for its entire run . . . and then some.
Show and tell
From the first episode, I pretty much was hooked. For those Dear Readers who’ve neither watched the series nor have any idea why it apparently was as successful as it was (I mean, nine seasons is nothing to sneeze at), a big part of it was the show’s premise. Equally (or more) important was that one of the actresses on the show was Meghan Markle. Or, as she’s now known, Meghan, Duchess of Sussex. Yep, that Meghan, Duchess of Sussex. Harry, Prince of Wales’ wife.
I’m not at all interested in (British) royalty (royalties, however . . . that I can get on board with). But I’m also not oblivious to it. Put another way, I’m dumb, but I’m not stupid.
Anyhoo . . . I binge watched the show. No small feat as there are nearly 150 episodes (note that for some reason, Netflix only has the first eight seasons of the series).
Best show ever? Nope. But good? Yep.
After one or two seasons, the viewer pretty much gets the show’s flow and themes. Season arcs, too, even if there’s a steady stream of surprises. This guy’s a jerk. The other guy jerks people around. This lady’s a sharp wit. That one’s got sharp elbows. Fun storylines, great writing, photogenic and/or engaging characters, Suits has all that and more.
There’s more to the story
All that kept my attention. But other things that I suspect few other viewers were as attuned to did too.
First, in probably every episode there are nighttime working scenes in the (terrifically) well-appointed office. There also were oodles of scenes in which one character visits another character’s home . . . at night. Sometimes by appointment. Usually not. And most scenes in most episodes involved the lawyers working. They were almost always working. On big cases and big business. Complex cases and business. Bet-the-company cases and business.
Also, the characters each took a tremendous amount of verbal abuse from fellow lawyer characters, and clients. Vicious verbal abuse. Verbal abuse meant to degrade, demean, and belittle.
If after reading this you’re wondering why anyone would watch the show, trust me that it is good, in spite of those things I pointed out.
Something never spelled out in detail (only by inference), is that the law firm characters were well compensated. Vvveeerrryyy well compensated. Given the New York-based white-shoe nature of the firm, the partner salaries exceeded $1 million. And for the main partners, multiples of that. The associate salaries and bonuses were in the several hundreds of thousands. And most staff salaries were north of $100,000; often well north of it.
Each character spent a lllottta that income. They wore expensive clothes and jewelry. Lived in expensive homes, in expensive neighborhoods. And ate at expensive restaurants. To the average viewer of the show, I imagine that the characters’ lives looked glamorous and enviable.
The devil’s in the details
The devil’s pact one enters into when working for most large, midsized, and/or otherwise fancypants law firms (and in no shortage of other industries) wasn’t spelled out for the lay viewer. But I assure you, it was on full display. In a nutshell, in exchange for those impressive incomes, the firm gets . . . their lives. Their whole lives
The money is hard for many like me to decline. Or for many like me to walk away from once secured. Especially for those like me who come from poor backgrounds. Or, like me, have eye-wateringly high student loans to pay off. Or, like me, have scarcity mindsets.
Thankfully, tho I gave over a lot, I never had to give over my whole life to my employers. Then again, my salaries, while nothing to sneeze at, weren’t at the eyebrow-raising levels of those at a firm like that in Suits.
But at some point in my career—even before discovering FIRE—I concluded that no amount of money would be worth giving up more of my life, let alone all my waking hours and more. Now on the sunny side of FIRE, I recoil at the very notion of the devil’s pact.
Working until late at night (or even the wee hours of the morning)?! Flute that!
Getting viciously ripped by a superior?! Flute that!
Having coworkers come to my home on business?! Flute that! And unannounced visits?! Get the flute out!
Un-Worthy
In short, while the characters in Suits looked great and successful, and did high-profile challenging work, if you ask this humble blogger’s opinion, they got an utterly completely garbage deal. I wouldn’t even consider it, let alone take it, now.
I mean, how much is your life worth? Can you even put a dollar value on it? If you’re an actuary, Dear Reader, I ask that you take off your professional hat when reading that last sentence.
To help analyze this tradeoff, let’s consider the actual hourly wage. We’ll use as examples, a partner earning $1 million/year and a midlevel associate earning $400,000/year.
Let’s make some assumptions, too. First, that the partner works an average of 85 hours/week (not unusual of for a lawyer in a firm like the one in Suits, hence all the nighttime scenes and housecalls), comprising: 40 billable hours/week, 10 nonbillable office hours (eating meals during working hours, talking to colleagues about nonwork stuff, bathroom breaks, recording hours and other personal practice administrative tasks, etc.); 30 partner hours/week/15 associate hours/week on client development, firm administrative tasks, etc.; 5 hours/week getting ready for, and commuting to, work.
Let’s also assume that the lawyer has a 2,000 billable hour/year requirement and that he or she doesn’t work on national holiday days. That works out to about 50 working weeks and, thus, 4,250 working hours for the partner and 3.500 hours for the associate. It bears spelling out, this attorney isn’t taking any vacation. None.
That works out to an actual hourly wage of about $235/hour for the partner and $115 for the associate (lower still after taxes). Now, for your average American, neither number is anything to sneeze at. But then again, your average American isn’t working 85- or even 70-hour weeks doing stressful work in a stressful environment. Or working 50 weeks/year and not taking any vacation. Or having essentially no life outside of work.
And I’ll remind you, Dear Reader, that we didn’t take into account time thinking about or decompressing from work. If we add that time in, and add just two weeks off for vacation (necessitating compressing that 2,000 billable hour requirement into fewer weeks), and use less-conservative numbers than I used (they are conservative), the deal looks all the worse.
For years, I’ve thought about how bad a tradeoff this is. But now that I’m removed from the actual environment, the memory became more distant. But no less pronounced. Seeing the characters on Suits in all those late-night scenes, and in their homes when a colleague came by to talk about something work-related, however, brought it all back.
And in the end . . .
What a dreadful deal. Precisely none of it appeals to me. In fact, it appalls me. But being totally in charge of my time, and without any financial pressures? I can’t even put a price on that. It infinitely exceeds the hourly rate of the highest paid lawyer at the whitest of white shoe firms. Being the master of my domain is awfully nice.
