Too busy to read it all? Try these books, blogs, webcasts, websites and other info resources curated by CCBJ especially for corporate counsel and legal ops professionals.
Article: ACC Resource Library
We love this piece from Mark Roellig, Senior Client Advisor with Perkins Coie’s Client Advantage team, which is rooted in a longer article about transitioning to an in-house role. Entitled “Top Ten Tips to be Successful as a New In-House Counsel (and Beyond),” it was co-authored with Sarah Kalgaard, GC of Vital Images Inc. Roelig’s piece, “Emotional Intelligence Matters,” calls on lawyers transitioning to in-house roles to shuck their perfectionist tendencies. “You do not need to be a great legal expert to be a great in-house lawyer,” he writes. “In private practice, you are paid by the hour, and the expectation is perfection in every aspect. For example, at a law firm, never send a memo to a client with a typo. A mistake is unacceptable. In the in-house counsel’s world, it is a little more ‘messy.’ The amount of information, effort and precision to employ takes judgment – your judgment and Emotional Intelligence (EQ) will likely be more valued than your IQ and legal knowledge.”
BLOG: inhouseblog.com
This piece by Valerie Fontaine, a legal search consultant based in Los Angeles, also looks at in-house roles and the very different attributes of “ideal” candidates vs. law firm roles. “In-house employers usually don’t value academic credentials such as law school prestige and the candidate’s class rank as highly as law firms do,” Fontaine writes. “Rather, they weigh legal experience, business sense, and interpersonal skills much more heavily.” The portrait she paints is of a business-minded generalist and juggler ready for anything and with different interpersonal skills than what law firms require. “Corporations usually don’t have attorneys, even junior ones, who work in back rooms, isolated from the businesspeople,” she says. “You share office space and meet with your client on a daily basis. Effective in-house lawyers get out ‘on the floor’ to see how people do their jobs and the issues they face, so they can give advice based on a thorough understanding of how the business really works.”
Published October 22, 2021.
