according to a post from xoxohth (which references a website to which i have no access), the average weekly hours at biglaw are more like 60. i take no responsibility for the correctness of the source, but it is in line with what people seem to say around that site, and they're all obsessed with biglaw.
so, 60 hours/week for $125K to start, with probably a $15K bonus a year (am i wrong about this bonus??). so it's 60 hours/week for $140K. that seems pretty decent to me. i can't think of many other fields in which you can get a job for that much, even if you worked that many hours.
even if you were only to work 40 hours, in biglaw pay, it would stil be about $95K.
even if you figured the extra 20 hours as over-time (time and a half), it's still about $80K.
at the least, it's twice as much as my friends coming out of undergrad are making, and even for many with MAs.
60 hours a week doesn't sound like that much, but it's actually pretty bad if you think about it. You're either working 12 hour days 5 days a week or 10 hour days plus a full 10 hour day on the weekend. The occasional 60 hour week isn't bad, but if you're doing it consistently it leaves you not much time to do anything else. Plus, I think that's a conservative estimate. I have lots of friends in biglaw; every once in a while they can get out of work around 7 or 8 but more typically it's between 9-11 and they almost always have to go in for at least one day on the weekend.
As for me, I think that I could put up with the workload, if it didn't seem so bone-crushingly boring. 60 hours a week of document review sounds pretty torturous to me, even for $125k. I'd love to make that kind of money, but having already been in a job that made me miserable before law school, I am trying to resist the pull to get into something that I know I won't like much just for the dough.
I think a lot of people do know what they're getting into, but convince themselves that somehow it won't be so bad for them or that they will be different, and like it. Out of maybe 15 biglaw associates I know, only one tolerates her job - and by this I don't mean that she likes it, I mean that she doesn't hate it.