• What is the reputation of the legal department within the company? What is your perspective on use of outside counsel and how much freedom will I have to select/retain/utilize outside counsel? I’m a litigator and employment attorney, so I always ask about settlement authority, settlement philosophy, and whose budget or who has skin in the game (but I’m a control freak so... 🤷🏼‍♀️).

• What is the formula used to calculate bonuses / raises? Is there potential for growth? How would you describe the culture of the company? Who decides whether you get a bonus / promotion? If the person you directly report to is not deciding your bonus / salary how do they evaluate your performance? How can you distinguish yourself in the company? What are the companies plans for expansion in the next year? Five years?
• Equity is what they should be giving away when they don’t have money.
• If the role is a backfill, really understanding why the previous person left.
• What was the last team activity you did and what is the frequency of team activities? (If it's more than annual, then run for the hills.)
• If we have a once-in-a-century global pandemic, will you lay me off? (Answer was yes 😅😭😂)
• Ask how performance evaluations are given. Is there a required bell curve regardless of performance? My company recently started this and to say we’re all angry about this is an understatement. Attorneys are high performers yet the company requires a certain amount of exceeds, meets, and partially performs, which is just complete bullshit for any department, let alone the legal team. It's called forced ranking and it sucks. Most large companies require it.

Associate and Attorney Responses:

• What’s your turnover like? Are you profitable ? If so, how much? Do you give bonuses? My current firm is a five-year start up and it's not profitable, so there are no bonuses and no equity.
• Ask the professional version of “what happened to the last guy with this job?” 😂