Follow Up to Career Advice - In-House Prospects

Orin Kerr graciously linked from the Volokh Conspiracy over here to the litigation versus corporate career post.  I want to return the favor by linking back to a set of comments being posted over there.  The same over at Above the Law.  There are a number of thoughtful comments out there. 

One of the themes being discussed is whether it's easier to move in-house if you've been a transactional lawyer or a litigator in-house.  I don't have any idea what the data is on this, but my philosophy as a general counsel, unless I was hiring for a specific specialty, like a litigation supervisor, an HR lawyer, or a patent lawyer, was to look for the best available athlete, and I had a track record of hiring both transactional and litigation lawyers to be divisional or business group GCs.

Many leading GCs are or were former litigators, including Jeff Kindler, first at McDonald's and then Pfizer (and now CEO of Pfizer), Peter Kreindler at Honeywell, Don Kempf at Morgan Stanley, Paul McGrath at FMC Corp. and then American Standard, and the list could go on and on.  John Donofrio, the GC at Visteon, and Bob Armitage, the GC at Eli Lilly, are patent lawyers by background.

I think many of the comments reflect something I suggested before, which is how hard it is at the bottom of the heap to experience what it's like to be a senior lawyer in either specialty.  For example, the communication skills you learn as a litigator translate nicely into talking publicly to a board or in a negotiation.  A congenial personality works well in front of a jury as well as in a boardroom (the six or twelve lay people in either environment tend not to like assholes any more than anybody else).  One of my mentors at Dykema, now retired, Don Young (Harvard '63 I think) had a fearsome reputation both internally and externally (as a summer associate I drew a cartoon of an associate who looked like he had just put his finger in an electric socket; the caption had him saying to another lawyer, "Don Young just reviewed my research memo"), but in front of a jury he was the embodiment of Mr. Charm.  Fortunately, despite the fearsome reputation, he also had a sense of humor and an appreciation for chutzpah in young lawyers, much less summer associates who had yet to get an offer!

[Jeff Lipshaw]