Latham & Watkins’ Parisian lawyers take two-hour lunches, sipping wine and sampling hors d’oeuvres, and can smoke inside the office. Associates can roll in around 10 a.m. — though they insist they stay late, too — and gripe about getting only six weeks of vacation.

Those are just some of the, shall we say, cultural differences that Kimberlee Hiatt, a second-year in Latham’s Los Angeles office, observed during a stint in Paris as part of the firm’s “global associate program.”