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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I'm sorry. I think the in-house counsel job is the holy grail of legal jobs and that makes them so competitive and hard to get- you are competing with people trying to bail from law firms, people trying to leave govt to make more money, people switching from one in house gig to another... Its brutal.

There are a lot of very small companies that don't have in house counsel and outsource everything. Maybe you can find a niche advising those small companies. [/quote]

So then what do experienced in house lawyers do?  Unlike lawyers trying to bail out of a law firm to in-house, it's very hard to go the other way because firms want specialized expertise (and clients), not general experience and business acumen.  [/quote]

This is what I was going to say too. In my experience companies want in house lawyers with a specific background (entertainment, real estate, insurance etc) as opposed to general corporate.[/quote]

I should clarify this is why a general corporate atty may have trouble getting an in house job - those are generally geared towards those with experience in the company's field.[/quote]

Yes, but the reality is that an experienced counsel in a medium-sized company probably knows a lot not only about "general corporate" but has done M&A, SEC reporting, financings, IP, HR, litigation,  antitrust, tax, international and so forth.  Many have pretty deep experience in two or more of these areas, as well as regulation applicable to prior emplyers' businesse areas.  And they are often business savvy, meaning that they think like business partners not just as legal experts.  They know how to manage budgets and  cross-functional teams and interact with the C suite and frequently the board.  But law firms are not an option/pathway even if in house lawyers want to go back ( and my guess is most don't).  It's a tough marketplace for lawyers like that who are out of a job now.  And the longer they have to look, there's a greater chance that a potential employer will consider them "stale" or  draw negative inferences about why they've been on the market a while.[/quote]

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