I tend to beat myself up whenever I make even small mistakes in my firm life. For those who went in-house, does that feeling get any better, or does it just follow you there too?

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It just starts over because being in house is a new set of skills. You’re starting over in a way. Just gotta live with it. It’s part of learning.

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I have effed up many times while in house… honestly, things move so fast that you have to learn to let it roll off your back. And to take ownership and come up with a path forward proactively. That being said, I do think the expectation of perfection is higher at a firm

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It's very different. I try to continually improve, but my standards are lower than in firm life because the competencies of a lot of the people I work with is also lower or different - sales reps who truly don't care about following protocol if they can close a deal, junior corporate folks with no worldly experience, etc. Firm level standards just caused me frustration when I applied them

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I think in a way it’s worse in-house as you generally have more ownership. Like your mistakes come out at the highest level instead of being caught by a partner. Or get caught after the fact, after which clean-up duty is required.

That being said, I do think the standard is higher at a firm. I think a partner will catch most things. While mistakes at an in-house level…for example, I’ve seen predecessors for my in-house counsel job get away with some pretty glaring errors that nobody caught.

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It gets better. Firm culture puts extreme pressure on 100% accuracy and no mistakes, ever. In-house works like real like; some things are really important and you can’t eff up, some things are medium, and some things you just do quick and move on.

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It’s better in house in terms of the day to day because if you have a good team, you really don’t sweat the small stuff and no one cares or judges you over minor inconsequential mistakes like typos. Obviously the big things are still important, like not missing major deadlines that impact the business’s bottom line, and there’s more ownership required in general so you need to feel comfortable owning your mistakes (like with any job). But I’ve found my anxiety has gone wayyyy down (nonexistent really) and in house life is so much better, because people are less neurotic and only the truly important things matter!

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I think this has more to do with the individual than the setting in which they practice. If you tend to beat yourself up, as I do, then you will continue to beat yourself up when you move from a firm to in-house.

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Way better. Because there’s often a lot of tolerance for low level risk (so long as you answer questions with “it’s probably ok, we see this as low risk”)

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