Law school hopefuls with an interest in business might hope to become an in-house attorney for a Fortune 500 company, but getting this type of job is not easy, corporate law experts say.
Because there is an extraordinary level of competition for in-house attorney jobs at large and internationally recognized corporations, someone who wants to eventually qualify for these types of jobs should know that it is rare to snag one of these positions straight out of law school.
Experts say the typical route to in-house legal jobs is to initially become an associate at a big corporate law firm, where you will learn how to translate the things you learned in law school into actual legal practice by assisting the firm’s partners with complex business law cases. Law firm partners are typically experienced lawyers who serve as mentors to the firm’s associates. Once you’ve spent a few years at a law firm, your resume is more likely to catch the eye of a general counsel at a large corporation, who might express interest in having you join their in-house attorney team.
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Robert Herbst, a Columbia Law School alumnus and business attorney, says that when he was a general counsel, he typically hired people who had several years of law firm work experience.
“I preferred to hire lawyers who had big firm training,” Herbst, who has experience working as both a partner at a large law firm and a general counsel for multiple publicly traded companies, wrote in an email. “Most companies cannot afford to carry lawyers fresh out of law school who have no practical experience. Once someone has some practical training, it will help them to find an in-house position if they can network with in-house lawyers who went to their law school. In general, corporations look for someone with the best pedigree, i.e., an Ivy League or top-ranked law school followed by big firm or Wall Street firm experience.”
Julia Shapiro, the CEO and founder of Hire an Esquire, an on-demand legal staffing agency, says the corporate employers that she works with are less concerned with where job candidates went to law school than with whether candidates have an interest in and knack for business.
“Our in-house clients look for attorneys that can think and act with a business mindset,” Shapiro wrote in an email. “The number one General Counsel pet peeve is a theoretical attorney that writes a thesis on risks and doesn’t practically think and advise on how to accomplish business goals and objectives within legal, compliance and risk frameworks.”
William Kruse, author of “The Corporate Counsel Survival Guide,” says that recent law school grads can become in-house attorneys if they come to the table with marketable training. Because many corporations are trying to reduce the amount of money they spend on legal costs, these corporations are expanding the number of full-time, in-house attorneys on staff, so they can avoid paying the hefty fees charged by big law firms, he says.
“In-house corporate departments have turned into almost small law firms, so opportunities have increased that have freed them up to hire younger lawyers, and as we’ve in-sourced a lot more work, we need people to do that work,” Kruse adds.
Kruse, who currently works as a regulatory compliance officer and in-house counsel at Gallup, says that there are an increasing number of entry-level in-house attorney jobs. “Historically, you did not go straight to an in-house role,” Kruse says. “The earliest you’d really see it was three to five years, but the majority would wait 10 years and sometimes longer. That’s shifted downwards considerably over the last decade.”
“The nature of work in-house has changed. So what we’re looking for now and what companies are looking for now can often be found in a lawyer with less experience,” he says. “If they have good business acumen, if they have understanding of the environment the business is operating in and its challenges, they can provide great legal advice and business advice at an earlier stage in their career.”
[Read: Find the Right Career Fit as a Future Lawyer.]
Kruse says he occasionally hires new law grads, but only for positions that don’t require an abundance of experience. He says transactional attorney jobs are often suitable for recent J.D. recipients, particularly if they had a business career before attending law school. However, Kruse says he would not hire someone straight out of law school as a corporate litigator.
Kruse says he looks for the following qualities when screening the resumes of potential permanent hires who recently received their J.D. degrees: extensive coursework in international and comparative law; an understanding of business-related legal specialties such as environmental law, regulatory law, privacy law and intellectual property law; and in-house legal internship or externship experience.
Kruse suggests prospective law students who want to become corporate general counsel look for law schools that emphasize the global nature of contemporary legal practice. Modern corporate lawyers are often expected to negotiate international deals and resolve international disputes, so these attorneys must understand how U.S. law varies from the laws in other nations, he explains.
“We deal with international supply chains, vendors [and] distribution networks,” he says. “You end up opening offices overseas or even deploying your own sales force overseas, and you have to know how those international regulations and laws apply to the company. That’s a key thing that in-house lawyers are dealing with today. And so you’d be well-served — if you’re thinking about going that route — in picking a law school that takes that seriously.”
Kruse also urges aspiring in-house lawyers to choose law schools located in major metropolitan areas with an abundance of corporate headquarters and a plethora of in-house legal externship and internship options. He says prospective law students should ask career service officials at their target schools whether any current or recent students have obtained an externship or internship with an in-house corporate legal department.
In general, Kruse says, prospective law students who want to become corporate lawyers should look for law schools with faculty and administrators who regularly advocate for job-hunting students by describing the accomplishments of these students to employers. One way to gauge how supportive a law school is of its students and how much the school helps students with their job search, he says, is to ask current students and recent grads what they think about the quality of the school’s career services.
However, Herbst says that aspiring in-house attorneys should strongly consider working for a big law firm before taking an in-house corporate law position, because having law firm experience is a valuable asset for an in-house lawyer or general counsel. He adds that corporate law firms have historically been great training grounds for young business lawyers determined to sharpen their skills, and he says that in-house attorney teams generally offer less mentoring and hand-holding than a large law firm would.
“They need somebody to hit the ground running right away,” he says. “They just can’t have someone carry the bag and go to meetings and go to depositions. [But] you need to learn and you need to see how things are done.”
Herbst adds that one of the key responsibilities of a general counsel is to supervise commissioned legal work that is being performed by outside attorneys at big law firms, which is easier to do if you have significant law firm experience.
[Read: Assess Work-Life Balance Priorities Before Law School.]
Herbst says that, just as a football coach might understand and provide better guidance to his team’s players if he was once a football player, a general counsel who oversees law firm attorneys can empathize with and better instruct attorneys if he once worked at a law firm.
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How to Find Law Schools That Lead to In-House Counsel Jobs originally appeared on usnews.com
