An in-house lawyer must be proficient in their specialty but the job is so different from what outside counsel do that candidates must think of themselves as a business person if they want to move from a law firm to an organization’s legal team, a recruiter says.
“Just because you were a really great law student and were hired by an AM Law 50 or AM Law 200 firm, it doesn’t mean you know how to advise someone in real time on a risk-adjusted business decision,” Mosah Goodman, president of Top Talent Advocates, said in a Cockpit Counsel webcast with LinkSquares CLO Tim Parilla.
Goodman said he worked with a general counsel who only wanted to hire attorneys who had at least 10 years of law firm experience because they were more likely to have the substantive legal expertise he wanted. As this GC put it, “‘Every year of outside counsel experience is equivalent to two years of in-house counsel experience,’” he said.
That might make sense if the GC is hiring in a highly regulated industry like financial services or life sciences, where someone is needed to navigate compliance complexity, but there’s little reason to think law firm success by itself translates into in-house success.
"You're being hired to understand what your organization’s values are and how to deliver toward those results,” said Goodman. “That might not be to avoid every risk in the world. Instead, it’s about setting up a way to enable the business. That’s your job as in-house counsel, and people who get that earlier in their career tend to rise quicker.”
As with other professions, in-house law is increasingly about emotional intelligence – “connecting on a human level, understanding what drives people and how to be good in relationships,” he said.
The best candidates for making a successful transition from a law firm to in-house counsel are those that are motivated by the idea of applying their legal knowledge in the service of the organization’s objectives. If they see the shift mainly as a way to work fewer hours without the billing pressure, they’re likely to be disappointed; the hours might be a bit less, but the work is just as challenging in its own way.
“More and more, clients are reconsidering their move after a short stint in-house to go back to a law firm,” he said. “It’s something of an anomaly from most people’s career paths. You’re running towards a whole new set of issues that require having an interest or an ability or the background and knowledge to add the commercial value that a company is hiring you for.”
He recommends attorneys think about why they want to make a change and what they see themselves doing five to 10 years later. Unlike at a law firm, where career trajectory is clear, once someone moves in-house, their career can take any number of paths, including leaving the legal team altogether and applying one’s legal knowledge in a different capacity: as head of compliance, for example, or going into business development.
“When you’re in a law firm, you’re managing your book of business,” he said. “When you move in-house, you’re managing your career. That’s something that needs to be contemplated before that shift gets made.”
A few years prior to COVID-19, the market for in-house counsel was particularly robust, and it remains strong today. But it’s tighter than it was then, he said. That makes it important to think through how to position yourself as someone who can help drive value for the business rather than just help the company avoid risk.
“More than we’ve seen before, it’s really incumbent upon individuals to make the case for their candidacy and their value-add to the organization,” he said. “You really need to demonstrate your business acumen and your ability to deliver results on the commercial side.”
