I think that it is not entirely accurate to characterize my work as corporate law, because my work partakes much more of temporary clerical work than it does practicing in the field of corporate law.
A corporate lawyer, as I imagine, has associates, infrastructure, an office, clients and cases. Cases, in this case, would be individual actions for individual clients in specific courts (or sets thereof) that occur in phases, through meetings, and negotiations, and pleadings and motions, and the winnowing of unimaginably vast swathes of information for relevant data, then wielding of same (in more motions and pleadings), to eventually lead to a real courtroom or settlement meetings and negotiations and agreements, over spans of years.
In contrast, I am hired as an independent contractor by a temp agency on a per-project basis and paid an hourly wage to be a flexibly programmable (and putatively professionally liable) pattern recognition system on a small sliver of the aforementioned winnowing phase ("Discovery"), in some cavernous converted storage space in a sick building cheek-by-jowl with up to 400 other professional colleagues (though you'd rarely guess it) at rented PCs two-to-a-pot-luck-supper-table, with only so much context as my handlers (generally not corporate lawyers, but clerical lackeys of same) provide (viz., no sense of venue, procedure, the claims or defenses contemplated by corporate lawyers, etc., to wit: no opportunity for investment in the grand pageant of modern commercial litigation), a set of information generally limited to a list of patterns to identify, some training on the software used these days for these kinds of projects, and the required hours.
Staffing agencies are hired by partnerships of corporate lawyers (firms) who no longer recognize the economic sense of hiring (and training and insuring etc) so many associates, when the work associates used to do (or, probably, used to supervise paralegals doing) can be outsourced. These days, clients know the discovery will be outsourced, they are billed for the work of TKAs (Temporary Contract Attorneys -- in the law we abbreviate "contract" with the letter K; I don't know why) at something like a "staff counsel" rate ($Partner>$Associate>$StaffCounsel>$All the rest of the firm's employees), then the firms and agencies keep their slices. Nowadays, agencies such as the one that has kept me at the same firm (several different cases and crises) since 2006 (with the occasional desolate span of no work), are, in parallel to their domestic projects, trying quite credibly to move the entire subindustry to the subcontinent, where English speaking attorneys will do the same work for a relative pittance.
Sometimes, the partnership-bound associate (the archetypal corporate lawyer, who is doing most of the leg-work on the case beneath the signature of the partner who owns the client relationship) will poke his or her head into the cavern for some ill-advised reason or another which usually comes out as some species of demotivation.
(Once, a lady no one had ever heard of before, named [name redacted on advice of counsel], came into the room where 100 bitter TKAs had been working 80-hour weeks under some delegated deadline pressure to finish the list of relevant documents that were being withheld as privileged communications--some of the more legal-ish work we sometimes get to do, and yet still more of an assembly line--and tried to motivate us to somehow do it better and faster by telling us that her ass was on the line. Heh. She will always feature in my pantheon of bad managers, and I will dream of someday informing her that I did excellent work after that speech despite the sudden antipathy I developed to her ass and related appurtenances. On another occasion, an "Of Counsel" -- not sure where they fall on the hierarchy, but my feeling is that "of counsels" are partners who have moved laterally from other firms, or who have been hired for particular expertise -- who was supposed to train the masses as to making determinations of privilege, [name redacted on advice of counsel and amicable sentiment] threw a tantrum and walked out because he refused to debase himself and we, his colleagues, by addressing us through a bullhorn, as those who had managed the project to that point were wont to do.)
Lawyers, as a class, are bad managers. (Humans, as a class ... !) Go figure. As the bullhorn may indicate, often the large projects do not afford participants a lot of dignity, if they haven't brought their own. These are generally managed by some combination of "Staff Counsel," who in turn answer, eventually, to some Associates who hope to become Partners, and paralegals. Staff Counsel will never become partners, but are salaried employees. As a class, we TKAs are bitter, shifty, and behave poorly . . . in a more passive-aggressive fashion than the stereotypically misbehaving arrogant attorney.
Some of us TKAs find a lot of freedom and easy money in it. Although I crave the relative security of salary and benefits, I find a lot of freedom in it: I never bring work home with me; I rarely feel constrained by my employers' projected schedule, or concerned with their opinion of me. I do consistently excellent work (me click button good!) and mostly behave like an adult, though, if given leave to, I will dress, as the managing staff counsel with the bull horn ([name redacted on advice of counsel]) once remarked "like a homeless person" -- with fancy shoes! So long as they're keeping me in a dingy cavern, that's sufficient. (Nowadays, I'm working with one other guy in a case room in the main office building, so business casual is the rule . . . maybe a few steps up from "like a homeless" guy, depending on the guy).
It is said that, from time to time, when the oppressed require it and the signs are right, the heavens will open up and some sainted TKA will be assumed bodily into the ethereal firm in the form of Staff Counsel, to sit beneath the foot of some Associate and be given dominion over some document review project wherein will be judged another crop of TKAs.
My preference to temporary contract attorney work (in order of decreasing preference) would be inspiring work, work that is good, or the work that earns me a salary and benefits.
I hope that is a hair well split. I am interested, in the event "corporate lawyer" were an apt description of my work, why should that be surprising?