A closely watched trial over junior banker hours is off. The sleepless nights aren't.

• Wall Street averted a closely watched trial over how many hours junior bankers can sleep.
• The settlement comes amid an M&A rebound that could lead to more sleepless nights for young bankers.
• It's harder for banks to protect junior banker sleep during a live deal, recruiters explained.

A lawsuit primed to expose the grind of junior banking is no longer going to trial this week, but the questions it poses about working life and hours are no less relevant ahead of a likely busy year.

Kathryn Shiber settled a lawsuit with boutique bank Centerview Partners on Saturday, two days before jury selection. She said the firm unlawfully fired her in 2020 after granting her accommodations for an underlying mood and anxiety disorder, including her request for eight hours of uninterrupted sleep each night. Court documents suggest that analysts on active deals at Centerview routinely worked between 60 and 120 hours a week.

The events of the suit happened years before Wall Street's promises to rein in burnout and protect young employees' health. Though top Centerview bankers will no longer have to take the witness stand, the case still reignites questions about the nature of work on Wall Street.

Nearly six years after Shiber's brief stint at Centerview, recruiters are predicting junior working conditions could intensify amid an M&A boom. They point to industry data suggesting juniors aren't logging significantly fewer hours than they did years ago — and an M&A boom that could intensify Wall Street working conditions.

Breaking down junior banker hours in 2025

Data from Odyssey Search Partners, a recruiting firm, found that junior investment bankers reported working just as much in 2025 as in 2022, the last time this survey was conducted. The firm surveyed more than 300 first- and second-year analysts last summer and found that they reported working 78 hours per week on average, the exact same figure as in the 2022 banking compensation report. Overall, 2025 was a busier year for dealmaking than 2022.

Juniors at elite boutiques reported working an average of 82 hours in 2025, up 4% from their 2022 average. By comparison, analysts at bulge-bracket banks — the biggest firms, such as JPMorgan and Bank of America — reported working 81 hours on average, up 1%.

"It's the junior bankers at the elite boutiques that have become increasingly busy, as they tend to operate with leaner deal teams and so the workload can't be spread as broadly," Anthony Keizner, cofounder of Odyssey Search Partners, said in a statement. He added that the intensity can eventually make those analysts more desirable candidates to private equity firms, should they want to switch to the buy side.

Wall Street had a reckoning — kind of

The findings come despite criticisms over junior bankers' working conditions that sparked promises of change.

Concern burst into public view during the pandemic, when record dealmaking and remote work stretched already punishing schedules even further. The conversation picked up again in 2024, when Leo Lukenas III, a 35-year-old investment banking associate at Bank of America who had just helped close a $2 billion acquisition, died.

Bank of America introduced a tool that year to better track junior bankers' weekly hours and flag when they exceed 80. In 2025, it elevated the chief resource officer role, which oversees juniors' workloads and career development, from a midlevel banker to a permanent position led by senior bankers.

JPMorgan also introduced an 80-hour weekly guideline for banker workloads, with exceptions made for certain circumstances, including live deals. Juniors get one full weekend off every three months, protected holiday long weekends, and a mandated no-work period from 6 pm on Friday to 12 pm on Saturday, with exceptions.

Long hours live on live deals

Jake Schneider, an investment banking recruiter at Selby Jennings, said that, compared to the pre-pandemic days, junior bankers aren't being assigned as much busy work during slow periods. But he doesn't think invesment banking analysts are working less on live deals, like the kind Shiber was staffed on during the events at the heart of her case, dubbed Project Dragon.

Court documents in Shiber's case reference an email exchange between her and associate Timothy Ernst about the time she signed off. In the exchange, Ernst said that he and another employee "shouldn't be up alone working." Associates and vice presidents still expect analysts to be logged on when higher-ups on the team are working, Schneider said.

"The expectation is, 'If I'm doing this, you're doing this,'" he said.

Many anticipate that 2026 will bring a boom in M&A activity — and, potentially, an associated spike in juniors' working hours.

"Given the increased deal flow the banks are reporting, we don't envisage that these working hours will see a decrease this year," Odyssey Search Partners' Keizner said.

Schneider said that Selby Jennings has seen a flurry of business in recent months, especially in recruiting for junior roles, as banks try to get deal teams ready for the anticipated activity.

"The biggest thing we hear is from a lot of our clients, they don't want to be in a position to turn down business because they're understaffed," he said.

There's a chance the projected deal activity doesn't materialize, and analysts aren't staffed on the types of deals that keep them working into or through the early hours, Schneider added. But if 2026 shakes out as many expect, it doesn't seem likely that juniors will sneak in 8 hours a night.