It's in the northeast U.S. - civil, not criminal, law. My MC is also working on his grad degree in Business Law so he can be of service in the family business, a large and successful one that he's dreams of heading up one day.
That strikes me as really, really bizarre, to the point of complete implausibility (and note, I am a lawyer). Graduate law degrees--ok, just to be clear, in the US, ALL law degrees are graduate degrees. The JD, which is the degree you need to become a lawyer, is a graduate degree. The law degrees that you can get after the JD, which must be what you're referring to here, are the LLM and/or the JSD. But there are only two reasons that American lawyers get LLMs, and only one reason they get JSDs. Those reasons are:
(1)
LLM or JSD--because they want to be a law professor. (But note, you don't NEED an LLM or JSD to be a law prof; it does help your candidacy, though).
(2)
LLM only, and only in certain specific very practical subjects (e.g. tax law)--because they want to be a tax attorney or a highly specialized prosecutor or white-collar defense lawyer.
If your MC wants to develop his business knowledge such that he can run the big business someday, not only does he not need an LLM or a JSD, but neither of those degrees would be at all appropriate. Either he just needs to get more experience by continuing to work in business law (i.e. on the civil side, in a law firm that either does mainly business law or is a big firm that does a lot of different kinds of law but has a big business-law practice), or he needs to get an MBA. If he wants to work on the finance side, a Master's in accounting might also be plausible (but you can do MBA's with a specialization in finance, so that might make more sense).
FYI, either an MBA or a Master's in accounting are something his firm might actually pay for or help pay for. In this economy that's less likely, but they certainly might let him work slightly part-time in order to have time for his studies. I say "slightly" part time because there's no way they're going to let him cut his hours down below maybe 70-80% of full time. Note that if they do that, they will prorate his salary (i.e. if he's supposed to bill 2000 hours a year, which means working at least 50 hours a week, and he wants to cut it down to, say, 40 hours a week, then his required billable hours will drop by the same proportion--from 2000 to 1/5 less, i.e. to 1600--and his salary will also drop by 1/5).
The only ways I can imagine a junior associate being allowed to work part time are if he wants to get a degree that the firm thinks
is useful to the firm, or if he has young kids and wants to be part-time until they're a little bit older (this latter option is drastically more common for women lawyers than men lawyers). Either way, his salary will be prorated and he won't be allowed to work what you might think of as a "true" part-time job--he'll still be at 70-80% of full-time.
