3 Thoughts On Moving Up Through The Ranks -- At Law Firms And In-House

The skills needed to succeed in-house are not the same as the skills needed to succeed at a law firm, according to Biglaw partner turned in-house lawyer Mark Herrmann.

What skills do people look for in lawyers?

Wrong!

The skill set actually varies, both with time and place.

When I worked at a law firm, I would have said that I was evaluating most lawyers on brainpower and technical prowess. If you were typically the smartest guy in the room, that was good. If you wrote briefs (and other documents) that made the right arguments in the right order in short sentences and little words, that was great. If you knew how to examine witnesses, that was spectacular. And if you worked efficiently, that was a plus.

What did I want in a lawyer? Good lawyering.

As lawyers at firms age, firms begin looking for another skill: Are you able to attract business? That skill correlates, if at all, only very weakly to whether you’re a good lawyer. Moreover, the ability to attract business is an unpredictable talent. People who ultimately develop that skill do so at different ages. And pure luck — were you in the neighborhood when the big opportunity struck? — plays a startlingly large role in developing business. Over time, however, the proof is in the pudding: Firms value (indeed, perhaps overvalue) lawyers who regularly bring in significant business.

What skills do people look for in in-house lawyers?

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At the junior levels in the law department, in-house lawyers must have the same skills as outside lawyers. Junior in-house lawyers must do great legal work; that’s what the senior folks (in the law department) evaluate.

But, at more senior levels, in-house law departments are looking for very different skills than law firms are.

It doesn’t matter if a senior in-house lawyer at a corporation can generate business. By definition, an in-house lawyer isn’t working at a law firm, so it’s not possible to bring in business. The widget company attracts widget business; the in-house lawyer isn’t directly engaged in that pursuit.

So what skills must senior in-house lawyers possess? Like their counterparts in private practice, senior in-house lawyers need top-notch legal skills. You hope that senior partners at decent law firms are fairly good lawyers, and you hope that senior lawyers at decent corporations are also fairly competent.

Beyond pure legal skills, however, on what are senior in-house lawyers being judged? Here are the sorts of things I see:

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Does the lawyer set objective goals for people on her team?

Does the lawyer serve as a visible mentor to others in the department?

Does the lawyer publicly recognize (and share) the successes of people on the team?

Does the lawyer have the courage to terminate unproductive relationships?

And so on.

What does that tell you?

First, the skills needed to succeed as an in-house lawyer are not precisely the same as the skills needed to succeed at a law firm. At junior levels, the necessary skills substantially overlap, but at senior levels, the skill sets diverge.

Second, if you think (or know) that you have a knack for developing business, but you really can’t tolerate the “squishy” stuff — Setting goals? Mentoring? Bah, humbug! — then stay in private practice, for heaven’s sake. Play to your strengths, and stay in the environment that will appreciate you.

Third, it’s actually pretty hard to write “objective goals” for many of the things that matter most in junior lawyers. That makes life hard for the junior lawyers; it’s hard to prove that you met goals that aren’t objective. But it also makes life hard for the senior lawyers, who are obligated to specify objective goals for folks on their teams. It’s easy to set objective (i.e., quantitative) goals for junior in-house lawyers for things that don’t matter too much: How many contracts did he negotiate? How many “intelligent business communications” courses did she teach?

And it’s also easy to set quantitative goals for junior lawyers at firms — again, for things that don’t (or, at a minimum, shouldn’t) matter too much: How many hours did he bill?

Because it’s possible to measure those things, corporations and law firms do. That gives supervisors an objective basis for measuring something, but not really anything that should matter.

It’s almost impossible to set quantitative goals for the things that actually matter, because the things that matter are so qualitative: Can he think? Can he write? That’s the important stuff, and there’s nothing to count at the end of the year to decide if the lawyer has met the goal.

Finally, many of the skills that are essential to first-rate lawyering are not simply hard to measure; they’re also hard to teach. Legendary Princeton basketball coach Pete Carril once told a scrub: “I can’t teach six foot ten, and I can’t teach vision on the court.” The kid stayed on the bench.

Similarly, I can’t teach smart. I can teach: “What we’ve seen before and should avoid in the future.” That’s almost like learning from experience, but not quite as good.

But I can’t teach: “There appears to be no way out of this legal problem. It’s midnight on a moonless night; all is lost. Gin up a solution that nobody else sees.” That requires brains and creativity. Some people have ’em, and some people don’t. But a senior lawyer can talk, or mentor, or “coach” ’til she’s blue in the face, and the junior person won’t make any progress.

Care to move up through the ranks? Start with being a great lawyer, and then develop the other skills that may prove essential to your career.


Mark Herrmann is the Chief Counsel – Litigation and Global Chief Compliance Officer at Aon, the world’s leading provider of risk management services, insurance and reinsurance brokerage, and human capital and management consulting. He is the author of The Curmudgeon’s Guide to Practicing Law and Inside Straight: Advice About Lawyering, In-House And Out, That Only The Internet Could Provide (affiliate links). You can reach him by email at inhouse@abovethelaw.com.