Where Is the Greenest Grass? In-House Versus Law Firm Jobs
We hear it all the time: “No thanks, I’m never going to another firm. I’m paying off my loans and then I’m going in-house.” Or: “I’m not super happy at my firm, but I’d only leave for an in-house job.” Or even: “I just want to go to a firm that sets me up to get an in-house job in a couple of years.” (I was also once told, “When I quit my firm, I’m opening up a bar,” but that’s probably less relevant.)
Are in-house jobs the promised land of the legal world, where the billable hour becomes a faint (unhappy) memory and you can make it to every one of your kid’s soccer games? Or are they career dead-ends, with low pay and no exit options?
The answer, as with most things in both life and legal, is: it depends.
Just as no two law firms are the same - and two law firms can, indeed, be spectacularly different - not all in-house jobs are the same. Working as in-house counsel for a huge international company is worlds away from working from a smaller family business, and both are different from working for a start-up. If you’re interested in working in-house and starting to chat with in-house lawyers to get a sense of their careers, don’t compare apples to oranges - talk to in-house counsel who work for the sorts of employers you’re considering.
Regardless of the specific job, most in-house jobs differ from law-firm jobs in a number of important, predictable ways.
The (Work/Life) Balancing Act
As any law-firm associate knows, life at a law firm is driven by the billable hour. If your firm or practice group is slow, it can be stressful trying to get enough work to make your required hours. If your firm or practice group is slammed with work, you might be billing hundreds of hours each year that aren’t “required,” but which you simply cannot turn down. You’ve got to learn to live your working life in 6-minute increments - and account for those increments, too!
At an in-house job, however, there’s no billable hour: no tracking your time, no stress of trying to make an annual requirement. Indeed, most in-house jobs have far more predictable hours, and usually, much shorter work weeks. (Obviously, if you’re in-house, you might have to work long hours if you’re in the middle of a big transaction or crisis, but even then, your outside counsel will carry most of the weight in terms of extra hours.)
Show Me the Money
If you thought that part about “no billable hours” was too good to be true, here’s where that aspect of in-house life is tempered with a dose of reality. The compensation at most in-house jobs is usually far below what a lawyer of comparable expertise and experience can make at a decent law firm. This salary differentiation makes sense: after all, at law firms, lawyers are the business generators. In-house lawyers, however, are cost centers. Even if, by their work, they are often saving their companies money (in the form of costly litigation or regulatory mistakes), they are not driving profit to their companies. Most lawyers who move from law firms to in-house employment take a significant pay cut.
What Do You Do All Day, Anyway?
The type of work law firm lawyers do usually differs significantly from the work that in-house lawyers do. At a law firm, most lawyers, associates and partners alike, have a number of clients. Even if you’re staffed on a giant case for one client at a firm, you’ll usually have a number of smaller matters for other clients as well, and your case mix might shift over time.
When you’re in-house, you have one client: your employer. This difference isn’t objectively good or bad - it’s simply a difference in the way you think about who you work for.
When you’re in-house, your practice is also usually fairly generalized. Your scope of responsibilities could cover all manner of practice areas: labor and employment, tax, contracts, corporate/securities, antitrust, ethics, intellectual property, privacy, and more. You might have more of a business role, rather than solely a legal function. And because most in-house counsel wear a greater variety of hats, they also often have to spend a degree of time haggling with others at the company about whether specific tasks even fall within the purview of the legal department.
Law firm attorneys, on the other hand, usually have much more specialized practices - even attorneys who otherwise think of themselves as generalists (general civil litigators, for instance). If you’re at a law firm, you’re generally not going to have to discuss whether an issue that’s brought to you is a legal issue. Whether or not you think it’s a good use of your time to answer a client’s question, if a client asks you a question, it’s still your job to come up with an answer.
Getting Your Reps In
There’s no question that if you’re looking for robust training at the start of your career, you’re going to find that training at a law firm, not at an in-house job. Whether the legal department at an in-house job is large or small, it’s not set up to train junior lawyers. (And some in-house counsel have reported that whether or not you’re looking for training, being in-house can also be somewhat lonely, if you’re in a small legal department.)
Because in-house employers generally don’t plan to train their lawyers, they also mostly don’t want to hire junior lawyers. They’re looking for attorneys who have gotten trained in the trenches of strong law firms, and can bring that knowledge and experience to work in an in-house position.
For this reason, we usually recommend that junior associates be wary about going directly in-house after law school, or after only a few years of practice. There aren’t many opportunities for junior lawyers to go in-house, anyway, but when such opportunities arise, weigh that opportunity very carefully. It can be very difficult to return to a law firm after moving in-house, especially for lawyers who don’t have the solid track record of years at a law firm before their in-house experience. Conversely, it’s not hard to move from a law firm to an in-house position, once you’ve gained the requisite experience.
Bragging Rights
Prestige is obviously somewhat subjective, and many people don’t care about prestige when making career decisions anyway (after all, it’s all about personal fit and not what others think, right?). But if you do care, even just a little, what your teenage rival is going to think when you see her at your thirtieth high school reunion, many lawyers think that being a rainmaker at a huge global law firm, or a named partner at a fancy boutique, is more prestigious than a steady, low-stress, lower-paying in-house job. And who are we to tell you how you should feel about bragging rights? (But have we mentioned that Swan Legal Search, which was founded almost thirty years ago, is often considered the best West Coast legal recruiting firm, and is staffed with high-end recruiters?)
Does it seem like there are too many factors at play in your specific career to easily decide on a path? Feeling like you’d like to discuss your circumstances with someone? We’d love to chat with you.