Lawyers With Side Hustles Are Becoming More Commonplace In Biglaw

Now you can work at Baker and be a baker, all at the same time!

A Biglaw job comes with Biglaw hours, but more and more lawyers are somehow finding the time to dabble in alternative careers on the side.

Have you been moonlighting as a comedian? Are you an LSAT tutor in your free time? Did you start a side gig making charcuterie boards? You are not alone — in fact, the number of attorneys with side hustles has recently risen to “astonishing” levels.

According to a recent study from Bankrate, side hustles have become a “growing feature” of the modern workforce. The American Lawyer had additional details on this new trend:

The Bankrate report, which featured a YouGov poll of more than 2,500 U.S. adults—nearly 1,000 of whom claimed a “side hustle”—found 53% of Gen-Z respondents and 50% of millennial respondents earned extra cash apart from their main source of income. The numbers were 24% for baby boomers and 40% for Gen-X.

That’s also led, or at least coincided, with a shift in the mentality at big firms, away from a norm in which every last minute is devoted to clients, said [Daniel Farris, partner-in-charge of the Chicago office of Norton Rose Fulbright].

“My view is we’re beyond the days of, ‘Alright, you’re doing a two-or-three martini lunch and golfing with your clients,’ and whatever. And that actually creates time that maybe people didn’t have,” he said.

Farris himself has a side gig of sorts: as noted by Am Law, he co-founded NMBL Technologies, the company behind the legal workflow management tool Proxy. “In a considerable way,” he said, “there are more and more lawyers who are looking to have a side-hustle.”

Perhaps the option to work from home during the pandemic allowed lawyers to be more creative with their time. John McBride, a litigation partner in the IP disputes group at Norton Rose, has his own side business (he co-founded a cocktail bitters company called Devil’s Retort), and attributes lawyers’ newfound creativity to the ability to work remotely.

He said he’s still a lawyer first and foremost, and puts client and firm needs first. But “I don’t think anyone necessarily wants to be limited to their professional job description,” he said. “It may be that with flexible work arrangements, work-from-home and the like, it may be a little easier to pursue these side projects when you have a more flexible work environment.”

Are you working another job in addition to your full-time Biglaw job? Let us know, and we may feature you and your business on Above the Law (if, of course, your main gig is aware of and okay with your side gig).

With Flexibility and Changing Norms, ‘Side Hustles’ May Be on the Rise in Big Law [American Lawyer]

Staci Zaretsky is a senior editor at Above the Law, where she’s worked since 2011. She’d love to hear from you, so please feel free to email her with any tips, questions, comments, or critiques. You can follow her on Twitter and Threads or connect with her on LinkedIn.