Hello young’uns, it’s Gramps, the retired biglaw partner here.
When I, too, was a young’un, one of the most dreaded things was a « night at the printer’s. »
When a prospectus was going to be printed, you would be Shanghaied, typically from the firm’s library where you would be doing research on an entirely different matter, and told you would be spending the evening at the financial printer proofreading.
It began nicely enough - you would be treated by the printer to a great dinner at a local restaurant while they were hot type printing the first draft.
You would then, beginning at maybe 9 pm, begin reviewing the first draft, not only checking for typos but verifying every column of figures with a pocket calculator (or maybe an abacus, I don’t remember).
Changes were then manually reset by the printer and you checked again. In the meantime, the seniors and the client might make substantive changes which of course had to be checked and rechecked again.
This would continue way past your bedtime, typically turning into an all-nighter.
In the meantime, your deadlines on the other matter you were researching in the library were of course being missed, so you typically had to go right back to work whenever this finished.
Does this (or some equivalent) still happen today, in the age of remote work?
Well, time for my Geritol.