I know these time-tested questions will be helpful next time you need to interview candidates for an in-house counsel role. As always, reach out anytime if you or your organization may benefit from our recruiting , leadership development , or legal and compliance department consulting services.
Find out how your salary package stacks up. Receive exclusive access to our informational blogs, newsletters and whitepapers designed to help you reach your professional goals. All Rights Reserved. Privacy Policy. Previous Next. Ask the right questions to find the best legal and corporate counsel One of the most important responsibilities of a General Counsel and other managing counsel is building a team.
People who have earned the trust of the business and leadership team tend to take on greater responsibility year after year. If someone has been doing the same thing for several years, you must dig deeper. Where do you bring the business the greatest value? The answer should describe how the candidate has provided solutions legal and business related , reduced cost, increased efficiencies, etc.
In-house counsel should bring potential solutions to the table, identify the associated risks, and make a convincing recommendation for the best move forward. The business will choose their own path and the counsel should be there to support the outcome, good or bad.
What is the positive feedback from your recent review? What adjectives do those around you use to describe you?
Look for words describing high EQ and leadership — good listener, humble, roll-up-your-sleeves, calm under pressure, relationship builder, solutions oriented. Again referring to your performance reviews, what are the areas mentioned for personal development?
Be on the lookout for any of the examples above. Someone with low EQ will not become a successful strategic advisor. Tell me about a time when a business partner was adamant about not taking your legal advice. What was the situation and how did you resolve it? Many law firm attorneys have the belief that they will have greater work-life balance going in-house, and this is often true. In their goal to become a profit center, some in-house legal departments have long, exhausting hours with a lower level of compensation.
However, this is generally not the norm. It is incumbent on attorneys to vet this issue when interviewing with any prospective company to ensure that work-life balance exists with appropriate questioning at the appropriate time, of course. The latter is generally a tell-tale sign that work-life balance does not exist. Another common complaint among law firm attorneys is the fact that they are essentially on call at all times.
They must be available to deal with client emergencies or deadlines that arise at unpredictable and inopportune times — e. As a legal recruiter, I have worked with and placed many in-house attorneys who report that they keep regular hours e.
As a result, these are often the people with whom the attorneys are regularly working, communicating and assisting on a day to day basis. For law firm attorneys, this level of interaction and exposure can be limited if not non-existent. If you do not make partner, you either remain an associate for many years until it becomes too embarrassing to stay; or, if it exists at your firm, you may move into a non-partner role with a special title — e.
At a company, attorneys often have various long term career opportunities available to them. Depending on the organization and its size, you may have the opportunity to move between practice disciplines in the legal group e. The in-house long term career opportunities are broader and may be more easily achieved than law firm partnership. Because law firms value attorneys that can develop and bring in new business to the firm with some level of regularity, this is generally a prerequisite to becoming a partner and remaining a partner.
However, this can be a daunting task for many attorneys because business development is generally sales-oriented, and it is not a skill that law schools or law firms teach. In an in-house setting, there is no business development pressure, need or requirement. Attorneys at law firms often are called to assist their corporate clients part-way through a deal or transaction when, for example, an issue arises; or, they may only be asked to handle a specific portion of a deal.
Conversely, in-house attorneys are generally not only part of deals from start to finish, but they frequently participate in the pre-planning and business strategy.
They also have the opportunity to see how their work and legal counsel impacts the company long-term. For in-house attorneys, the company or business unit s within the company is the client. The in-house attorney works with internal legal and business teams, all having a common goal to assist their single client.
This is contrasted with doing a little here and a little there for multiple clients and lacking the same level of cohesiveness.
While many attorneys are under the impression that they may get less sophisticated work by leaving a big law firm and going in-house, this is simply not the case with many companies. As a cost-cutting measure, more and more companies are keeping their legal work in-house versus outsourcing it to outside counsel. So, where you have a large, global company that keeps much of their legal work in-house and engages in complex and sophisticated transactions or litigation valued at billions of dollars, the end result is that their in-house attorneys have the opportunity to work on exciting, high-profile and sophisticated legal matters to which they may not otherwise have access.
This is even more true at many big law firms where some associates get little hands-on experience or interaction with the clients. Large companies with global operations require legal counsel in the countries in which they are conducting business. This is often accomplished with attorneys native to the country in which the company has operations, but many companies are also sending their U.
Kher Sheng arrived during the process of starting up a fund, when the paint still smelt fresh on the walls, and found that the role involved not so much answering legal questions, but coming up with the questions in the first place. Our sources learned that in-house counsel need to step up and take responsibility quickly — because the role necessitates taking more decisions than a law firm associate might typically be expected to make. This means jettisoning any feelings of risk aversion left over from private practice.
Because non-legal members of staff will be looking for the lawyer to input into decision-making. If new in-housers adopt this thinking early on it will be a blessing in disguise, in a climate where the emphasis is increasingly on where you can add value outside of the day to day expectations of the role. Therein lies an important realisation that came late to many of the in-house counsel GC spoke to for this piece — often legal expertise is a given in the eyes of the business, which focuses instead on what else a lawyer can bring to the table.
Hand in hand with this guidance for a lawyer new to business is to develop a thorough knowledge of the sector they are entering, outside of the legal sphere. It sounds obvious, but many corporate counsel hold their hands up and admit they are lacking in this area.
It can be a steep learning curve, but the pay-off is clear further down the line when an appreciation of the real-world implications may be the difference between the success or failure of legal advice. And it takes a number of different forms. Company lawyers have to make the adjustment to a revenue-based frame of mind — the idea that every choice has a financial impact. Being able to speak to the CFO on an equal footing is an important aim for new in-housers, and there is a growing trend for lawyers to study for an MBA or a similar business qualification before making the leap into business, or even during their tenure.
There is the feeling that law schools are improving their business training provision, although most agree there is some way to go in this regard. There are everyday adjustments that those new to the role can make to improve their offering to colleagues across the organisation.
Correct documents are expected, of course, but a side effect of a thorough understanding of the enterprise is an enhanced ability to discern the commercially important elements when marking up a document.
Not everyone is working on a trading floor with several screens flinging information at them, but many general counsel had to learn to be concise early on.
You have to inspire them. The ability to be firm therefore is an essential skill. But many GCs we spoke to struggled initially with the pressure of being parachuted into a leadership role after being a team member in private practice. The world of the corporation is much more diverse, and so a junior in-house lawyer might discover they need to work on their interpersonal skills.
For this reason, it can be easier to keep all the plates spinning the more senior a lawyer is before the transition. In that sense it helps if you are more senior because you tend to find it easier to stand your ground. Despite the challenges, all the in-house lawyers GC spoke to have found being in-house to be tremendously enriching.
A counsel who sees the whole life cycle of a transaction has a more nuanced understanding of business and a better appreciation of the needs of a variety of stakeholders.
These in turn make for more effective input to a project.
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