Why This, Why Now? Lessons For In-House Counsel

I have done many things over the course of my 30-year legal career. I have been a paralegal in the military and a paralegal in a mid-size law firm; I have been a litigator for a law firm and a litigator for a government agency; and, for the last 10 years, I have been an in-house counsel for various public agencies. Of all these roles, I have to admit the role I have loved the most has been my role as in-house counsel for a public university.

Transitioning from role to role was never easy. As I look back over my entire legal career, I have come to realize that one transition stands out. It was not my transition from paralegal to lawyer nor was it my transition from private practice to government private. It was the transition from my outside counsel role to my in-house counsel role. While I have heard many lawyers lament that law school did little to prepare them for their roles in civil law as litigators or in criminal law as prosecutors and defenders, I would say law school did even less to prepare me for my role in business as an in-house counsel.

The role of in-house counsel is unlike any other legal role. Why? To be a good in-house counsel, you have to unlearn a great deal of what you learned as an outside counsel and as a litigator. When you land a job as an in-house counsel, you quickly understand that it is not your legal acumen that is the key to success. You learn that the key to success comes from embracing a completely different mind set.

Thanks to Above the Law, I will have the chance to share all that I have learned about that transition and more things in-house related through monthly articles. Some of what I plan on sharing includes, but is not limited to, the lessons I learned as an in-house lawyer:

1. You need to learn to solve problems and not to win arguments.

2. You need to learn to be a business person first and a lawyer second.

3. You need to learn to embrace calculated risk and to not be preoccupied with liability.

4. You need to learn that sometimes public reputation and perception will trump potential liability.

5. You need to find your place on a leadership team made up of professionals from different career fields.

6. You need to understand your entity’s organizational structure from the ground up.

7. You need to do less talking and more listening.

8. You need to accept that trust and respect is not freely given. It is earned.

9. You need to understand there are people who will consider you a cost of doing business (hopefully a necessary one).

10. You need to understand that your control is limited and sometimes bad things happen despite your best efforts to prevent them.

Why this?

These are just a few of the lessons I learned through trial and error. Because I worked for public agencies related to education, I joined professional associations that catered mainly to government lawyers or education lawyers that talked about the law and little else. I want to change that. I would like anyone who works in-house, regardless of industry, to have a place to go to learn from other in-house lawyers about the intersection of business and law. What better place to do it then here?

Why now?

In the Spring of 2020, my life was transformed. I became active on LinkedIn where I connected with hundreds of lawyers virtually. With those connections, I forged relationships. Because of those relationships, I began doing things I had never done before including co-authoring a book with 19 other lawyers. Today, I am part of an incredible global community of in-house lawyers, primarily on LinkedIn. I have learned so much from this community.

In an effort to expand my in-house lawyer community, I wanted to explore ways of connecting with more up-and-coming in-house lawyers, new in-house lawyers, and experienced in-house lawyers. What better way to expand this in-house community and share all that I have learned than by joining other lawyers like Olga Mack on the pages of Above the Law? Thanks Above the Law for this opportunity!