When I was a first-year associate working nonstop while battling a flu, I worked under a humorless second-year associate who said to me: “Unless you’re on your death bed, you’d better be at the closing tomorrow.”
So when I read this week’s New York Times article about the harsh work culture at Amazon —employees crying at their desks, hounded to inform on colleagues and work through tragedies—I immediately thought of parallels between law firms and the Seattle-based company. The Times made those parallels explicit in a follow-on story the next day, which cited the so-called Cravath system of law firms culling large associate classes until only a fiendishly determined elite remains.
