In-House Counsel

Inside Straight: Landing An In-House Job

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I had lunch recently with a guy who’s looking for an in-house job. He was complaining about how tough this is: “Recruiters don’t do you any good. They’re focused almost entirely on moving lawyers between law firms; they don’t know about in-house jobs. The recruiters who get retained to do job searches for corporations are working for the corporation, not you. If you don’t match the criteria the corporation laid out, they don’t want to talk to you. How the heck does one land an in-house job?”

Surprisingly, I’d never thought about this issue. (I wasn’t looking for an in-house job — or, indeed, any job at all — when I landed in my current position.) Because I’d never considered how one obtains an in-house job, I had no idea what the answer was. So — always thinking of you (and searching for blog fodder) — I picked the brain of a headhunter-friend.

How, I asked the headhunter, should a lawyer go about looking for an in-house job?

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Moonlighting: Should Companies Hire Attorneys Straight Out Of Law School?

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Companies don’t typically hire law students. The greatest concern that companies have about hiring law school graduates is training. In-house legal departments don’t want to have train new lawyers, and prefer that law firms take the effort to pass on the needed skills before we go ahead and pinch some of their best associates.

That said, there are certainly several examples of companies that have successfully decided that it’s a good thing to hire counsel who know virtually nothing about practicing law. In this post, I’ll examine some of the pros and cons of hiring newbie lawyers versus law firm trained, not-so-newbies for entry-level in-house positions.

For the first issue at hand, what is this magical “training” that law firms are so good at providing…?

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Inside Straight: Cravath Summer Bonuses!?

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Don’t read this post again! It would be unbearable.

I’m unabashedly doing two things with this post:

First, I’m serving my purpose: My new book has been published! Here’s a link to the ABA Web Store’s page for Inside Straight: Advice About Lawyering, In-House And Out, That Only The Internet Can Provide.

Second, I’m serving David Lat’s purpose: Above the Law becomes more valuable when readers click through links and read multiple pages of text. I’ve therefore hidden the information about Cravath’s summer bonuses (if any) behind this link…

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House Rules: What Does It Take to Stand Out?

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“Could be a brooch, a pterodactyl…”

The line above is from Airplane, a 1980 comedy that is regularly included in all-time top ten movie comedy lists.*

“Johnny” is the character who utters this and many more scene-stealing lines; he owned each scene in which he appeared, and was played by the late Stephen Stucker.

Each time he was on screen, and there were far too few appearances, you were drawn to watch him just to see what he would say. He nailed every line, and the audience loved him. My friends and I would regularly quote the movie in our younger years, as it signaled a paradigm shift in movie comedies –- riotous farces that contained foul language, sexual innuendo, and brief nudity. Among this genre, and ground breaking at the time were Caddyshack, The Blues Brothers, Stripes, and Porky’s.

These movies helped American movies evolve from the mid-’70s “cinema” into the early ’80s “blockbuster.” While these films broke boundaries and changed the rules, and even seem quaint by today’s standards, they’re still funny. But, back to Mr. Stucker.

While it is difficult at best to steal scenes in Biglaw, and be the person that folks remember (for the right reasons of course), it is even more difficult in-house. When you first transition, you are usually entering a company with policies and procedures, uncharted politics and a set hierarchy of power. You find your place soon enough and begin to learn from those that came before.

It is hard to stand out….

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Above the Law Seeks Marketing Managers for Partner and In-House Sectors

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As we continue to expand our coverage of law firm partners and in-house counsel here at Above the Law, we are looking for talented individuals who have experience with these constituencies in a marketing capacity and who wish to join a fast-paced, growing media company. The marketing managers will work closely with the ATL editorial, research, and business teams to develop new products and services targeting in-house lawyers and partners at large law firms.

If you are interested, please send your résumé and a cover letter explaining how you are perfect for this job to jobs@abovethelaw.com. We welcome your ideas on how we can engage with these audiences even more, and we look forward to hearing from you.

Inside Straight: Odd Misperceptions Of Job Qualifications

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Two years ago, my company had to hire a lawyer to serve as our head of litigation for EMEA (Europe, Middle East, and Africa). We weren’t using a recruiter, so we had to locate candidates the old-fashioned way — by putting the word out. I called one of my former partners (a 60-ish corporate partner, who did a lot of work with European clients) and asked if he could spread the word in Europe that we had a position open. He startled me:

“You don’t have to do a job search. I’ll do that job for you.”

“Excuse me,” I stammered. “You do M&A work. You speak only English. You’ve never litigated in a common law country, let alone a civil law one. How could that job possibly make any sense for you?”

“Managing litigation isn’t very hard. It’s really a matter of knowing how to handle the outside lawyers. And given all the time I’ve spent doing deals in Europe, I have that skill down cold. Let me be your head of litigation for EMEA.”

I had forgotten entirely about that conversation until I had lunch last week with a 40-ish litigator at a different Vault 20 firm. He, too, didn’t understand that corporations are different from law firms; at corporations, the specifics of your work experience matter . . .

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Moonlighting: Putting Your Best (Flat or Heeled) Foot Forward At The Office

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In light of some perspectives on women’s fashion that have crossed Above the Law recently (and because I like to beat horses until I’m absolutely sure they’re good and dead), I’d like share a few thoughts. When it comes to what to wear at the workplace, most of us women agree that women should dress professionally. And most of us know what dressing professionally generally looks like, even if not everything is perfectly laid out.

However, there is this “small” issue that there are still too many sexist job interviewers out there who expect women to go beyond just dressing professionally, and demand that we dress in a way that they consider feminine and appropriate for a woman.

Now, some women are perfectly comfortable wearing skirts and heels, and of course there’s nothing wrong with that. Other women suspect that such items are the devil’s handiwork. In any case, most women aren’t happy when other people dictate how any of us dress in the workplace, so long as we’re meeting the basic standards of professionalism. After all, it’s a rare occasion that men at the office are judged for not dressing in more masculine attire….

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Inside Straight: What Happened To The Careers?

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As regular readers of this column know, my son, Jeremy, took a pass on law school: “I really love you, Dad. But basically you help big companies that did it get off the hook.”

Now, if I mention to physician-friends that my son’s in medical school, those friends often react the same way: “God love him; I hope he enjoys it. But I’d never go to medical school these days. Between the insurance companies, the hospital administrators, and the government, there’s no longer any joy in practicing medicine. It’s hard to treat your patients, and it’s hard to make a living. I suspect that things will only get worse over time. I loved being a doctor, but I sure wouldn’t want to be coming out of medical school today.”

I guess that means that today’s college graduates should think hard before deciding to go to medical school. Cross medicine off the list of desirable career choices.

And everyone in the legal profession knows the story about law . . .

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House Rules: It Was the Worst of Times…

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Last week’s column caused a bit an uproar at my attempt to analyze the recent JP Morgan loss of funds from an in-house perspective. I later posted the following in the comments section, and since most of you don’t venture down there (wisely), I am reprinting it here:

“I will take the heat for a column that should have flowed better from factual assertions to analysis. I take the point that attorneys may not have been at fault, and I should have made that point with more clarity in the column. I also should have been more clear in laying out a linear argument from the facts reported in the media. The point I was going for, however inartfully, is that this trade was likely reviewed by someone in a legal capacity prior to approval, and that review should have caused someone pause. Dimon himself admitted that this was a strategy examined by him and management over a month before being executed. [I] [a]gree that the risk analysis was likely not performed by attorney(s), but it doesn’t take a huge leap of faith to presume that the legal technicality of whether this was a proprietary trade or a hedge appeared on some lawyer’s desk. And given the distrust of CDS after the recent malfeasance rife in the industry, is it so hard to believe that … lawyers were involved? Nope, I wasn’t there, and I made a poor attempt to examine a scenario which only magnified my lack of fluency in the subject matter. Mea Culpa.”

Now, on to today’s attempt to offer an in-house perspective….

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Inside Straight: Pessimism Has Its Pleasures

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According to George Will, “Pessimism has its pleasures. Ninety percent of the time you’re right, and ten percent of the time you’re delighted to be wrong.”

That’s how I go through life.

What made me a pessimist? Nature or nurture, perhaps? (Should I blame my parents’ genes or their parenting skills?) Decades defending litigation, which forced me perpetually into a defensive crouch? (If that’s the reason, then plaintiffs’ lawyers must be optimists.) Or my preferred explanation: Keen observation of reality, coupled with endless experience, naturally breeds pessimism.

As an outside lawyer, my pessimism meant that I presumptively expected the worst (or, at a minimum, the least) from colleagues, opposing counsel, clients, and courts. Those folks generally performed precisely to my expectation, reinforcing my pessimism.

As an in-house lawyer, how does pessimism infuse life?

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