Legal News

The In-House Job: A Good Gig if You Can Get (And Keep) It

By Ashby Jones

For many years and for many lawyers, an in-house position was the dreamy antidote to law-firm life. Sure, the financial upside wasn’t as good, but everything else was better. The 9-7 M-F hours allowed for time with kids and weekend getaways. The job security was great; you felt part of a larger organization that worked for a common purpose; maybe there were stock options. Even after we switched to journalism, we still found the very notion of the in-house world somehow soothing.

That’s why we were a bit chagrined to read today in this article that in-house lawyers and departments are struggling right alongside their law-firm counterparts.

According to the article, Hyatt, Cigna, General Electric, Motorola, Merrill Lynch and Yahoo! are among those that have reduced the number of attorneys in their law departments during the past year.

Some of the lawyers were shed as part of broad employee dismissals. “Anybody who’s not generating revenue is particularly vulnerable,” said Steve Shapiro, the general counsel at Rosemont, Ill.-based Cole Taylor Bank.

The pain for in-house attorneys has generally been spread across industries, with lawyers at those companies most affected by the recession faring worst, said Deborah House, who is deputy general counsel of the Association of Corporate Counsel.

It’s funny. When times are good, in-house attorneys can be inexpensive alternatives to outside counsel in some cases. In recent years, in fact, “in-sourcing” at corporate legal departments has been all the rage.

Still, according to the story, there’s a point at which the legal workflow slows so significantly that the cost equation tilts in the other direction, presumably when a company has eliminated all or most of its law-firm work and still doesn’t have enough for its in-housers to do. Their high salaries and healthy benefit packages are suddenly seen as expensive overhead, in-house lawyers said.

“Name an industry where you’ve seen a significant problem, and attorneys are experiencing it along with everybody else,” said House, pointing to auto manufacturing, insurance and financial services.

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on March 24, 2009 (boomark / email).