There are advantages and disadvantages to working for either a private law firm or an in-house legal team, and if you’re thinking about making a move from one to the other, there are some things you should be aware of beforehand.
Of course, you may have already received advice and commentary from friends and colleagues in the legal profession which you’ve found to be helpful, but it pays to be as informed as possible before making a significant transition. To help out in that regard, here are some pros and cons associated with moving from one of these situations to the other.
Job Satisfaction
As a general rule, more attorneys experience higher levels of job satisfaction with in-house legal teams, as opposed to working with private firms. One of the biggest reasons for this is that they don’t have to go through the billing process when working with an in-house legal team. Since in-house attorneys are spending their time and effort on projects which don’t have to be tracked down to 15-minute increments for clients, the hassle of billing is mostly removed from your job responsibilities.
The environment of a private law firm is such that the requirements of precise billing force a lawyer to be constantly shifting gears and changing his/her mindset from one case to the next, and from one billable client to the next. When this happens several times during a day, it can leave you mentally exhausted afterward.
When you’re working with an in-house legal team, the chances are that projects you work on will engage you for at least several hours of the day, if not the entire day. Not only can you ignore the constant constraints of billable hours, but you have the freedom to immerse yourself in a single area of pursuit for a much more extended period of time.
Financial Incentives
A private law firm may be able to offer you a compensation package which is very attractive, and which you might think is hard to beat if you were to jump to an in-house legal team. However, there could be a possibility that a position with an in-house team provides you with opportunities for purchasing stocks or other options that can eventually be worth far more than any compensation package a private firm would offer you.
In fact, some of these stock-option packages can be so lucrative that they can be used as a retirement nest egg, and can entirely provide for your long-term future. Because of their natural organizational structure, private law firms are unable to match this advantage and offer the same kind of financial incentive.
Burning Professional Bridges
One of the arguments against making a switch to an in-house legal team is that by and large, once you’ve made this kind of move, you can’t retrace your steps and go back to private law practice. For one thing, the majority of attorneys find the whole billable hours routine to be repugnant, and they would prefer having it removed from their lives forever.
Another drawback to trying to move back to private law practice would be that you no longer have any clients to take with you to make yourself appealing to a private law firm. In general, when you’re trying to become a partner at a private law practice, one of the things you need to bring to the table is a following, i.e., billable clients that add value to the law firm you want to join.
Private law Firm Advantages
If you can get over your aversion to the billable-hours process, there is more job security to be found in private firm practice. In-house legal teams are quite often subject to extensive and entirely unexpected layoffs whenever there’s a downturn in business for a company, and budget-cutting becomes the order of the day.
It’s no exaggeration to say that in such situations, literally hundreds of legal professionals can be axed by a single managerial decision. It also happens frequently enough that acquisitions and mergers can severely impact the legal teams of one or both companies involved, and at such times, headcount can take a severe hit. The bottom line is that, since an in-house legal team is more subject to a corporate mentality than a private law firm would be, there is a higher likelihood of slashes being made in the size and composition of an in-house legal team.
Another advantage of working for a private law firm is that there are considerably more opportunities available than there are for in-house positions. Most lawyers also know precisely where they stand in a private law firm in terms of the organizational chart, simply because it’s much better defined.
When working with an in-house legal team, there are likely to be any number of legal professionals who have more or less the same status, which makes for a relatively vague and possibly uncomfortable situation. Professionals working at a private law firm invariably have a clear understanding of their position in the hierarchy, as well as what it would take to climb upward in that hierarchy.