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With the increased range of routes to qualification available to aspiring solicitors, opportunities to train and qualify in-house at a company, a previous rarity, has become more prevalent. If you’re curious about learning more on other options available beyond the staple a training contract at a law firm, look no further!

What are in-house lawyers and what do they do?

In-house lawyers provide legal advice and services to the company they work for directly, as opposed to working for a law firm and representing multiple different clients.

The role of an in-house lawyer is to provide advice on any legal issues within the company’s remit. This includes the negotiation and reviewing of contracts, ensuring compliance with relevant regulations, identifying legal risks facing the company and advising the company on contentious issues. Unlike a lawyer at a law firm, an in-house lawyer will often collaborate with their company’s various non-legal departments such as sales, marketing and finance.

How are they different from lawyers at a private practice firm?

For in-house lawyers, their company is their client – a fact that distinguishes them from solicitors at law firms that advise multiple external clients. In-house lawyers work within their company legal department, assisting on various legal issues faced by the company. This offers opportunities for cross-departmental collaboration as well as exposure to multiple (typically commercial and corporate) legal practice areas.

Another big difference arises in terms of how the two are paid. While solicitors in private practice bill clients for their services, meaning time-recording is an essential addition to performing their tasks; in-house lawyers are considered employees of their company and are therefore paid a salary. This means that their role is to support the company with its legal issues as they arise rather than meeting hourly requirements and billing clients in order to generate revenue for their firm.

Similarly to their law firm counterparts, in-house training contracts typically involve seat rotations, although they tend to be more flexible both in terms of their length and in terms of the amount of choice a trainee gets. Due to the less structured nature of the in-house legal department, in-house trainees are often given more responsibility earlier in their career. Some in-house training contracts even offer the opportunity to do a secondment at a law firm, though this of course depends on the provider in question.

Advantages and disadvantages

Like anything else, working in-house – whether pre, or post-qualification – has its ups and downs.

There are a number of advantages to working in-house:

• Work-life balance: as their payment is not based on billable hours – unlike their law firm counterparts – many in-house lawyers tend to find they have a better work-life balance.
• Stability: while the work of law firms is typically more susceptible to client fluctuations, the work of in-house lawyers tends to be more stable.
• More involvement in business decisions: as they work for one company, in-house lawyers are often able to build a deeper, more holistic understanding of their business, which may allow them to become more involved in their company’s operations and decision-making.
• Less pressure to specialise: in-house lawyers encounter a wide variety of practice areas in their work – including media, commercial and corporate law. Upon qualification, there’s no pressure to qualify into a specific practice, but rather an expectation that the solicitor will maintain their wide-ranging access to this variety. If you’re someone who is looking for a varied rather than niche career, this may appeal to you.

However, there are also a few disadvantages:

• Lack of specialisation: as described above, the exposure to a variety of different types of work may not be of interest to someone who eventually wants to build a niche career specialising in one area of law.
• Quality of training: in-house training is more independently motivated than private practice and lacks some of the more rigid structure typically offered by law firms. Many in-house programmes lack the same internal training structures of their law firm counterparts and individual trainees are expected to take more initiative to develop their skills than they perhaps would otherwise.

Concluding thoughts

Ultimately, in-house training contracts offer a viable alternative to the traditional qualifying route. Whether you’re looking to qualify in-house, considering a post-qualification move out of private practice, or merely trying to get a better feel for the wide variety of options available to you, hopefully this article gives you an idea of the range of what’s on offer.