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Counsel Jobs > Attorney Resources > General Counsel FAQ's |
Frequently Asked Questions |
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| WHAT ATTORNEYS NEED TO KNOW |
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Q. What is the best way to work with General Counsel Consulting?
Q. What makes General Counsel Consulting different from other placement firms?
Q. When is the best time to consider a move in-house?
Q. What are in house employers looking for when making hiring decisions?
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Q. What is the best way to work with General Counsel Consulting?
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A. If you have any interest of going in-house either now or in the future, your best option is to submit your resume to us either by submitting it to jobs@gcconsulting.com or online by clicking here.
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| Regardless of whether or not we currently have a position matching your inter-ests, rest assured that we will contact you when and if we have an appropriate position for you. We are eager to discuss your career goals and what you are seeking in terms of an in-house career.
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Q. What makes General Counsel Consulting different from other placement firms?
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A. All we do at General Counsel Consulting are in-house placements of attorneys. Focusing on in-house placements means that our livelihood and success as a company is entirely dependent upon how well we understand the in-house market and the attorneys interested in working in it.
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| As a division of Juriscape, the largest attorney-employment conglomerate in the world, we have the resources and expertise to serve you with more information, more understanding, and more options than any recruitment firm anywhere.
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| While other placement firms may mix law firm and in-house placements and spend time on paralegal and other sorts of placements, our focus at General Counsel Consulting is specific. The difference between working with a recruiting firm focused on in-house placements exclusively and one that does many things is profound. Let General Counsel Consulting go to work for you.
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Q. When is the best time to consider a move in-house?
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A. Contrary to common belief, there is really no perfect time to make a move in-house. Nevertheless, it is generally important that you get at least 1-2 years of experience in a law firm before transitioning in-house. The reason for this is that law firms typically provide the best platforms for developing your legal skills-whether you are in litigation, corporate law, real estate, or intellectual property, for example.
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| Attorneys have moved to in-house positions after 1 year of experience as well as after 30 years of experience. The choice to move in-house is entirely up to you, and when contemplating your move, you should consider your own motivations and the quality of the opportunity presented at the time you are interested in moving.
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| The largest concern to keep in mind when moving to an in-house position is whether or not you feel like you have acquired the legal skill set that will make you comfortable being an attorney inside of a corporation. If you have acquired this skill set, then you should have no concerns about taking a position in-house.
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Q. What are in house employers looking for when making hiring decisions?
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A. There are generally two classes of corporations that hire attorneys: (1) corporations with attorneys inside them that know what they want and (2) corporations with few, if any, attorneys inside them that think they know they want. Obviously, there are numerous classes of corporations - large, small, established, emerging, etc. Depending upon the sort of corporation in which you are seeking to work, your qualifications will be viewed in a correspondingly different light.
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| In larger and established corporations, they are typically seeking attorneys who are well qualified and like the attorneys within them. Traditionally, larger corporations use prestigious brand-name firms for their outside counsel and a lot of the attorneys within these companies are gleaned therefrom. Accordingly, in the largest companies, you will typically see the same sort of hiring snobbery that characterizes many large law firms. Thus, the hiring attorneys inside the company will be interested in which school you attended and how well you performed academically in addition to which law firms have employed you. They will also ask a lot of questions about the type of work you undertook and in which practice areas.
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| While the largest companies will generally know exactly what they want, smaller companies are much more likely to have no idea what they want. Certainly, if someone inside a smaller company hears you can get his/her company an attorney from Harvard Law School, he/she will be excited (but who's to say that every attorney from a top law school is actually a good attorney).
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| Recently, one of our search consultants attended a wedding where the head of a wildly successful manufacturing product, who had made tens of millions of dollars in a period of months with a runaway hit, came up to him. The man had been living in the United States for fewer than two years and barely spoke English.
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| Recently, one of our search consultants attended a wedding where the head of a wildly successful manufacturing product, who had made tens of millions of dollars in a period of months with a runaway hit, came up to him. The man had been living in the United States for fewer than two years and barely spoke English.
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- "I need one of those courtroom attorneys," he said.
- "Yeah," the recruiter said, somewhat amused. "To do what?"
- "File motion with court and argue. Attorney need to argue good. I pay top dollar and at least $5,000 a month, but attorney must not screw around."
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| As unbelievable as these sorts of exchanges are, they occur all the time. There are countless small businesses out there that have made a great deal of money and need attorneys to work for them. While our role as legal-search consultants is to provide such emerging companies a great deal of guidance and counsel about how to hire an attorney, we are sad to say that this line of counsel can often fall on deaf ears. The corporation will often have no idea what type of attorney it is hiring - it just realizes its need for an attorney. Incredibly, in the dot-com days, legal departments of 10 or more attorneys were often built this way by entrepreneurs using other people's money to assemble the legal department they thought they needed.
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| While one might believe this sort of hiring is confined to entrepreneurs without a solid knowledge base, it is also commonplace in some larger corporations that do not have well-organized legal departments.
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| At General Counsel Consulting, the focus of our business is assisting corporations to understand exactly what they need in their legal departments. Unlike law firm-placement agencies, we do not necessarily care where you went to school or what organization you are coming from. Because a great many of our clients are not hung up on snob appeal, we can afford to introduce them to the best attorneys for their open positions and not just the ones who look best on paper.
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