(Author) Attorney:

Can people transition from law firm directly to a general counsel role? Can anyone speak to that experience?

Senior Counsel Responses:

• When you say “general counsel” do you mean the top lawyer at a company? Titles vary widely in-house, and “general counsel” can mean different things in different groups/company structures. If so, that’s going to be a hard sell if you’ve never been in-house before, even more if you don’t have experience in the company’s industry/business. It can happen, but it’s a tough sell. It's easier if the person served as outside counsel to the client/outside GC.
• I’ve also seen a couple senior associates do it from a general corporate practice- usually to a client with whom they worked closely. So they were basically acting as “outside GC” before actually jumping. It would be hard to land that role without an existing close connection.

Deputy General Counsel Responses:

• Not quite what you asked, but I jumped straight to my current role. I report directly to our GC and have a generalist role, including everything from corporate strategy work to litigation management, compliance, internal investigations, and M&A. It was stressful at first as I had a lot to learn, but they were a long time client so I knew the business well. My background is definitely atypical as I came from a niche industry based practice, so I had background in litigation, M&A, regulatory counseling, employment, etc. within our industry. While I’d primarily call myself a counselor and litigator, having a very broad background (especially the counseling and M&A combo), sort of uniquely set me up for this role in a substantive way that I don’t think this is common.

General Counsel Responses:

• I did it as a 10th year associate. I had been a litigator for a few years, then six years of ECVC/sell-side M&A experience. I taught myself the basics of tech trans, real estate, nonprofit compliance, healthcare regulatory compliance, and employment law by not farming all the ECVC work to specialists and doing it myself. I didn’t have any problem doing the GC job from a skills / experience perspective.

  But they only hired me bc they knew me - they were the client of my mentor and had been my client for the five years or so before I went in-house. I hated it unexpectedly. It was a health care organization. I didn’t see this from the outside but management was really toxic to line employees and paid them like crap while exploiting them. All of management, me included, were underworked and overpaid. A textbook example of what David Graeber describes in bullshit jobs.

  I was on the right side of the politics, but that just meant I was one of the bad guys. And as you’d expect the toxic half of leadership weren’t great partners for legal or compliance.

  I stuck it out for a year, then I lateraled to be #3 at a SaaS unicorn healthcare startup. I am much happier not being in charge and having more experienced people to learn from and to have a buffer or two between me and the worst of the management politics.

Partner Responses:

• I know someone that did this. He was a very experienced partner though.
• It's possible.

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