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Conversation Starter
My advice, as someone who went BL>in-house>BL: do your due diligence. I think interviews often telegraph what the job is going to be to be like. There definitely are a ton of 9-5 jobs out there, where you just enter into a smooth system, you do your work, and you go home without a worry in the world.
Then there are places where it’s just as much of a meatgrinder or maybe even worse, because you get less support.
I joined a company against my intuition. I was a mid-level/senior, but the week I joined two other lawyers left. I was the only lawyer in my department and had nobody else to check things with. Then I also started getting things outside of my area of focus, as I was the only lawyer in my department. Then there was a ton of focus on cost-cutting, so a lot of it was being held together by ducttape. And because it’s not biglaw, a lot of colleagues in other departments will treat it as just that: just a job. Which sucks when you are supposed to have deliverables, but you’re dependent on an accountant who is like “sorry, it’s 4:45, I’m done for the day.”
All in all, make sure it’s a well-running company.
Think of it this way: if it weren’t a lot better, everyone would go back, given the pay differences…. But most don’t go back.
People don’t talk enough about how the job itself is different from biglaw. The type of work you do and the metrics of success are fundamentally different in house — in-house practice is way more “mile wide and an inch deep,” and relationships + institutional knowledge are currency. In biglaw, you’re handling all of the big, complex, research-heavy tasks that IHC doesn’t have the bandwidth for, then handing them off for IHC to analyze and translate for the business. So I’d also think about what type of work you want to be doing, alongside the amount of money you want to make and the WLB you hope to have
Pro
It depends on the in-house job. I’m in-house and make close to biglaw money, and definitely don’t work biglaw hours. So it’s definitely possible.
Chief
Securities At a F500 stable company and its nice and easy. Maybe ppl with bad experiences are at smaller companies or recent IPOs etc.
If you go into big tech, they actually match BL comp typically. A lot of other companies, especially tech unicorns, will pay pretty close to more BL. Depends on your expertise though, and the area you plan to go into.
Idk, I'm securities counsel and I think about going back to a firm quite often (and I absolutely loathed big law)
Overworked, don't make as much as I used to, incompetent team and management.
F
Conversation Starter
F
Depends on the company. There are plenty of toxic legal departments.
Conversation Starter
How do you differentiate good companies to work for from the bad ones?