Wednesday 16 January 2008

Working in-house – a trip into the bleeding obvious

City Firm I was interested to see this article in the Times law supplement this week. Jonathan McCoy who now works as an in-house lawyer for Vodafone provided an interesting insight into life as a corporate lawyer with a company. He sets out some of the qualities needed by an in-house lawyer and the difficult-to-swallow realities that must be faced. Some are interesting and insightful – others are obvious and trite:

Be prepared to leave your comfort zone. (Remind me what that is again; even as a recent graduate, I can’t remember what my comfort zone was like).

Hiding away in an ivory tower isn’t looked on favourably (oh really? – why’s that then? Oh yeah, it’s just the IT dept who can get away with that).

You don’t necessarily need to have a background in a specific area (but it probably helps).

Be able to work fast (after all, slow lawyers are SO ‘last year’).

No fence-sitters allowed (are you kidding me – the most daring lawyers go out on a limb just twice during their careers).

This is all very interesting, but can you put it in English (as distinct from Vietnamese, I suppose).

What work-life balance? (You chose corporate law, buddy - work IS your life). Get over it.

...And so on.

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