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It’s a fundamentally different job than being at a firm. What worked at your firm generally speaking doesn’t work in house. Your job is to help the business move forward while avoiding unreasonable risk (and whether it’s unreasonable is usually a business call). Obviously every company has their own ways of working, but generally speaking:
1. Get comfortable giving advice. Caveated ambidextrous memos (on the one hand/on the other) are a thing of your past. I almost never write an email that requires my business colleagues to scroll on a phone.
2. Get comfortable really quickly with giving your best possible advice on truncated schedules with less than perfect (and never enough) information.
3. Learn to explain things very very simply while getting the important information across. Long, rambling advice that take forever to give doesn’t make you sound smart, it just gets you ignored by a business that often needs (or at a minimum wants) to move quickly.
4. You’re now a cost center and will never again have the resources that you had in a big law. Just accept it.
5. Just accept that you will work with people (lawyers and the business) who aren’t at the level you might have worked with at your firm. That said, how you interact with your colleagues will be fundamental to your success in house.
6. Your job is to help keep the trains moving without derailing. A creative “good enough” solution beats perfect almost every time. 99.99999% of the time, wasting time polishing your advice beyond a certain viable point is just a waste of time.
7. Get comfortable with risk. Most firm lawyers are absurdly risk adverse. Point out the meaningful risks, let the business make an informed decision, and move on (while protecting the company from the inevitable downsides of bad decisions). I have a very small list of red lines where I will stop the business from acting. Basically, the business is allowed to make bad commercial decisions but not criminal or existentially stupid ones.
This is spot on
Ask lots and lots of questions when your in-house clients ask you to do something. Don’t presume they have considered all the ins and outs or repercussions of their request. That is part of what I find most enjoyable about being in house. Much of my job is puzzle solving and issue spotting.
If you will be working on contracts, don’t be afraid to question the existing forms used by the company. Sometimes a new set of eyes helps to simplify, clarify, and correct inconsistencies, that others have missed over the years. I clean up my own forms on a regular basis.
Starting day one, meet your clients. Find out what their goals are and what risks, legal, financial, operational, competitive they want to avoid.
In-house is so much better than big law. You will be part of deals from start to finish, rather than just seeing one small piece.
Part of your job is advising on risk and letting the business make the judgement call on whether to proceed. Good luck and congratulations.
With luck, the rest of the inhouse legal team will be congenial and happy to have another set of hands. If you are able, try to shadow other lawyers at the company as they work on projects. They will be familiar with common issues and can explain how they have handled in the past.
Trust your judgement. I have worked with a lot of sales people and engineers over the years and they just want to get the deal done. They aren’t trained to look for issues like lawyers are, or to pay attention to the time lines for getting regulatory or other approvals.
Have conversations with them to really understand what they are seeking. And they often aren’t clear in describing what they want - thus the need for questions and clarity.
I’m
If you will be working on contracts or writing anything, I recommend “A Manual for Contacts Drafting” by Kenneth Adams.
As another commenter noted, One of the toughest things to learn is getting comfortable with giving the good enough answer. For the day to day you will often need to do that. But if the company wants to open a new business line or something out of the ordinary you will probably need help from outside counsel. Knowing which is which situation is important.
Sit at the table. If your clients have regular planning meetings or team emails, see if you can attend or be added to the mailing list
It will take some time before you feel comfortable at this. Learning the business is the first step.
Trust your instincts and remember they hired you because they thought you were up to the task.
Document, document, document. You will sometimes get asked about projects you did a few years ago. All your emails will have been auto-deleted after a year. So you need to have a process where you document projects and advice, often saving off important emails to a project folder. Keeping those records organized will make it easier to “do it again” for a new project and answer questions about what actually happened.
(1) Do it on the backed-up network drives (so you don’t lose stuff when IT screws up your laptop upgrade). (2) Organize by folders (and sub-folders depending on how much you work an area): NDA, patent license, sales contract, employee conflict of interest investigation. (3) I used “Attorney Notes - Confidential and Privileged” as a filename (often listing the matter name in case I had multiple open) in each sub-folder where I needed notes. (4) These may be on communal Legal servers, so be clear enough that others can use.
You don’t need notes on everything, unless you were substantially involved. And over-document a bit at the start, so you can pull back a bit as you find your groove.
When you realize you are person of a lower caliber CLO is referring 😭
If you have the capacity to realize it then you’re not such a person.
Learn to budget your money.
Pay is sweet?
Great advice in this thread. I left biglaw a few years back and all of this rings true.