My very first “real” law job after getting called to the Ontario bar, back in 2015, was at a small firm. One hallway. Four offices. Small. Because I was new, impressionable and not the least bit jaded yet, I took what everyone told me with no grains of salt. I was salt-less. Shortly after I joined, one of the associates, someone I really liked, left to move in-house. Since I was new to practice, I didn’t have a sense of what that meant. Then someone told me that the associate was far too young to take a “sunset job” and that in-house is where you go when you “can’t cut it in real practice.” Less than a year later, I went in-house myself. Ironically, it was only then that I felt my career had truly started and that I began to develop into the lawyer I am today.
In 2018, I moved to a litigation boutique. Roughly five years after that, I went back in-house and landed my current role: senior legal counsel at Intact. I’m still “young and green” by some standards, but I’ve spent enough time in private practice and the corporate world to know that I haven’t settled into a sunset job. In fact, that view is laughable. Over the past two decades, corporations have invested considerable resources into their legal departments. Modern in-house practice offers a lot—mentorship, sophisticated casework, opportunities to pivot to a non-legal role, competitive pay—to lawyers of all kinds. Below, I’ve broken down each perk in detail.
Mentorship. Historically, corporate legal teams avoided junior talent. The tradition, instead, was to recruit well-trained associates from private practice. That’s no longer the case. At a time when the largest law firms in Toronto have cut back on associate recruitment, the number of articling positions and junior roles at government agencies, municipalities and companies has risen significantly. Better still, young in-house counsel now benefit from extensive training and mentorship. It’s typical for junior talent to work on complex files, interact with management, and attend and help run professional skills workshops. I can say that from experience.
The quality and diversity of the work. It used to be my impression that companies assigned the “easier,” smaller files to the in-house department, while sending the complex, high-stakes files to private firms. That, too, is no longer the case. Cost is clearly a factor: in-house teams don’t produce hefty legal bills, divided into six-minute increments, that can easily reach tens of thousands of dollars. Yet this trend has also been a boon for corporate counsel who want to carry dynamic cases that were once a pipe dream for someone in their role. In litigation, for instance, in-house counsel now handle incredibly sophisticated files that traditionally went to outside firms. It’s a tremendous opportunity.
You can move around to find your perfect job. You might have heard people say that a law degree opens a lot of doors. That sentiment certainly rings true for in-house counsel at larger companies. When I began in my current role, my manager at the time made one thing very clear: he never wanted me to feel like I had to leave to pursue another opportunity if a similar one could be found at the company, even if I no longer wanted to work as a practising lawyer. That manager was no anomaly. Across the in-house landscape, lawyers routinely move into management or transfer over to the business side. You can try something different, in other words, without having to leave your pension behind.
Often-overlooked compensation benefits. Speaking of pensions, they seem pretty rare these days. At a law firm, an associate’s compensation generally consists of (1) a salary, (2) a bonus and (3) health benefits. As an in-house lawyer, your compensation package will likely include all of those—including the bonus—and several other components, such as a defined contribution or defined benefit pension plan, plus an employee stock-purchase program. In most cases, though not all, your base salary will be less than it would be in private practice. But your total compensation could be comparable or, surprisingly, even higher.
One perk that is not guaranteed when you move in-house. You will not automatically work less than you did in private practice. Generally, that’s the goal, but it doesn’t always turn out that way. Here’s why. Think of the time you dedicate to work as smoke, and your workday as a container. If you keep expanding that container, the smoke will automatically spread to fill it. Quite often, corporate counsel bring to their role an inability to say no to work when they are already at capacity. For those people, the in-house world will feel just as busy as private practice.
Remember: you remain your best advocate when it comes to building a career that will keep you in this profession for as long as you want to stay in it. Don’t assume that an in-house job is a simple path to less stress, fewer obligations or a shorter workday. Instead, look at it as a different sort of role that you can grow into over time. Then you’ll be prepared to make the structure of an in-house career work as best as possible for you.
Odette Ansell is a senior legal counsel at Intact. She also hosts the Non-Billable Hours Podcast.