But it may depend on the nature of the legal department you're joining
A few years of experience at a law firm, previously considered a must – or at least an advantage – may have lost some of its lustre for lawyers seeking in-house careers.
“Things have changed, at least a bit,” says Fernando Garcia, who has over 15 years of experience as a general counsel providing strategic and legal advice on Canada-wide and international legal matters. “The old model called for two to four years in a law firm before going in-house, but now more and more people have experience working in some kind of legal-related environment, like labour or industrial relations.”
While to varying extents, law firm experience as a prerequisite for a legal department career depends on the individual, their goals, and their passion for an in-house job, Garcia believes that many of the skills learned in law firms are redundant or outdated for in-house lawyers.
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“For example, do you really have to know how to file claims as in-house counsel? Not really, and that goes for a lot of other things you learn and experience in law firms.”
The evolution of the in-house role from legal to strategic advisor has much to do with that.
“The deeper you get in-house, the more you spend your time on relationship management and business matters and the less on technical legal questions and issues,” Garcia says. “If I had to do a small claims court matters at this point, I wouldn’t have a clue.”
Fifteen or 20 years ago, Garcia notes, it was cheaper to hire an in-house lawyer than to retain external counsel.
“Again, because in-house roles have changed to a completely different model, hiring a lawyer in-house for their technical skills doesn’t work as well as it used to. In-house lawyers don’t need the technical skills to the same degree as they did historically because they’re no longer just hired guns and have become strategic business partners.”
As Andrea Wood, chief legal and governance officer at Telus, sees it, a few years at a law firm can’t hurt. But the degree to which that experience is necessary, she adds, depends on the context.
“If someone comes to Telus directly from law school, they’ll find themselves in a pretty big legal department [90 staff across Canada] that has structured learning capability and professional development initiatives tailored to our department and our business. If, on the other hand, someone’s joining a mid-size or small company, law firm experience can be very useful.”
Many lawyers indeed transition to in-house later in their careers.
“These individuals bring a wealth of knowledge and skill, but from a personal viewpoint, it’s a hard transition because the cultural differences can be quite striking. That includes a corporate environment that is very different, incentives that are not the same, and being part of a cost centre rather than a revenue centre,” Wood says. “What that meant when I started was that there was less emphasis on making me effective as a lawyer than there might have been at a big firm.”
For those whose career does take them to a law firm before they embark in-house, Axiom, which provides contract lawyers to legal departments, offers several tips to help lawyers understand the differences between working at law firms and in-house.
They include the fact that legal departments do not present the pressures of staying on the partner track that usually comes with a law firm career; project turnaround tends to be faster in-house because legal departments are embedded with their clients; in-house provides more opportunities to expand skill sets or explore new practice areas; and creative solutions usually trump black-and-white answers in-house.
The upshot is that transitioning lawyers should focus on collaborating and offering guidance in the mould of a business partner. And as part of the business, the legal department is part of the problem, so “over-communication” with partners is critical.
Finally, lawyers should expect more real-time feedback in-house instead of the yearly performance reviews that characterize law firms.