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Attorney Ryan Billings describes his six years working at a white-shoe law firm in New York as “crazy, wonderful, amazing, terrible, and caffeinated.”
Says Billings: “I basically worked and slept and did very little of the latter.”
With the expectation of billing more than 3,000 hours a year, Billings was a 24/7 captive of his job, regularly employing the showers and beds that were available at the firm.
“It was all-consuming, which was great and awful at the same time,” he says. “But I wouldn’t trade the experience for anything.”
Billings accepted a position at the prestigious law firm for the same reason he had chosen to attend Harvard Law School: He welcomed the intellectual challenge that came with being and competing among some of the country’s best legal minds.
He learned a tremendous amount about corporate law during his time at the firm, Billings says, but when he considered his future there, he saw too many partners with multiple failed marriages who never saw their kids and spent their entire life working. In short, it wasn’t a lifestyle price Billings was willing to pay.
“As much as you love it, you either have to fully commit to that career and accept all the consequences or you’ve got to get off that track,” says Billings.
He chose to get off the track and leave behind the bright lights of the big city to return to the greener environs of his home state of Wisconsin, from where more than a dozen years earlier as a brainy and eager college-bound student he had been only too enthusiastic to depart.
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