Corporate lawyers - in-house life?

[northlondonmama78]

Hi lawyer parents

I've been back at work for about a year at a silver circle firm post mat leave and a suite of weekend ruining deals has made me rethink work life balance. About 8PQE and on partnership track in theory.

Anyone have any views on in-house life and how much better it can be? I would probably go for an in house fund or corporate role.

Husband earns well so not massively money driven but want an interesting, challenging job and happy to work hard but just slightly more predictable hours and not holidays or material amounts at weekend.

Any thoughts extremely welcome!

I went in-house at 10PQE and would never go back! Every company is different but I love being embedded in the operations of the business, and having such a close relationship with my clients

I work about 20 per week and get paid a full time salary, bonus, pension.

I m on call end of quarter, each quarter for about a week and am expected to be available from 7 am to 11 pm for the week before EOQ. Obviously down time when I m not required. I WFH full time.

I would never go back to practice. You are usually much more involved in risk assessment and expected to have commercial acumen.

I left magic circle private practice around 6 PQE and have been in house at an investment bank for 15 years. The hours are definitely much better than private practice and I enjoy the work a lot more but I have still worked many late nights, weekends and holidays at different points and am generally expected to be on call/checking email out of hours the same as in private practice. That said, I was doing highly transactional roles for most of that time and am now managing a large team. Others even within the same bank have better hours (but less interesting work and/or less career progression). If money/career progression is not that important to you, it's definitely possible to find in house roles in all sectors that have relatively stable hours and still a good mix of work. I have two small kids but I rely on my husband (who works more
predictable hours) and a full time nanny - without them I wouldn't be able to manage the hours/workload.

Just to add, I have a lot of friends who work in house at corporates and unless you're in a general counsel type role for a large corporate, the hours are very good, most of them work 9 to 6 with no weekend work and can WFH most days. The pay is obviously less than investment banks/funds and far less than you'd get as a partner at a silver circle firm.

Thanks all, that's very helpful. Unsurprisingly, there is some comp v work life balance trade off so I guess need to figure out exactly what would work for us on that scale.

@namechange19912 - do you find that when you have to work weekends / holidays, it's a call for a couple of hours or is it like an all day / totally unpredictable thing? I guess my issue (I do a lot of PE) is the "auction draft lands on Friday so we need to sign on Monday" type situation. We also have a full time nanny so I can probably manage long hours provided they are slightly more predictable.

Yes, for the most part weekend and holiday work is a few hours here and there rather than the whole weekend, you still get the deals that come in Friday and need to sign by Monday but the good thing is law firms will be turning the docs so while you may need to get on calls to go through the docs, the law firms will be doing the heavy lifting. You also have slightly more control over when on the weekend to work, depending on the bankers and client (a lot of my deals are with PE clients and they tend to be the worst, requesting Saturday night calls for no reason for example). But you're not at the bottom of the chain like external lawyers are, and if you work in house on the buy side you probably have even more ability to say no to times that don't suit. Also now that I'm quite senior, I can delegate a lot so weekend work only comes up if there is something seriously blowing up, whereas partners at a law firm never really get to work less from what I've seen. All in all I have no regrets about moving in house (other than the financial aspect) and around your level is probably the perfect time to do it before you get too senior as there are lots of in house jobs at the 5-9 PQE level and then far less until you get very senior eg partner moving to GC role.

I went in-house after years in private practice and found it way more balanced, though the pace can still be full-on depending on the company. If you’ve done any work related to compliance or investigations, healthcare whistleblowing might interest you—check out https://federal-lawyer.com/whistleblower-lawyers/healthcare/. I had a colleague move into that space and found it a good fit coming from a corporate background.