What is an In- house attorney or lawyer,what is their salary, the pro and cons.
Matt
in-house refers to a company (or other business) having their own legal team rather than using an external firm either on a retainer or individual basis (in mobile phone terminology, contract or pay as you go).
Obviously having your own legal team means that you have lawyers at your disposal, and these will be able to learn the business inside out, which is very important because in commercial practice understanding your client is key. An in-house department might include lawyers who cover a number of specialisms or highly specialised lawyers. This largely depends on the business needs.
An example would be a company who invent products. There might be worth in having internal lawyers to handle the intellectual property rights, particularly to act as patent attorneys. Similarly an insurance company may want lawyers who specialise in fraud.
I recently approached a commercial property company for work experience. I learnt their legal team deal with a number of specialisms including acquisitions and leases, venture capital, and matters of corporate law. Because of the wide-ranging issues they might deal with, were they are more generalised, in house legal departments will still refer matters to an external team.
The pros are simply:
The in-house lawyers learn the business, whereas external lawyers will seek to apply general commercial sense to the situation
It may be cheaper if there is ongoing work for the in-house team to do. In the patent application example, this would probably always be cheaper.
The lawyers can become highly specialised in an area the business often deals in, for example patent applications, or to use a different example agricultural land purchases.
All staff time is spent on the business's matters, not a 50 second phone call charged as one 6 minute unit, whilst the other 5:10 is spent dealing with other business's.
Lawyers are always available, you don't need to go see an external firm at their convenience.
The cons on the other hand:
It is expensive to hire lawyers to do nothing, especially when you'll be paying comparable pay to a lawyer in private practice.
An external firm will usually have more expertise, in that firms tend to have multiple departments that often work together to complete transactions. In-house lawyers tend to be very specialised in one particular area, or so generalised that they need to refer externally anyway.
Basically as a business you'd need to look at cost-effectiveness. It probably never will be unless you are a big business turning over millions.
For the lawyers concerned, there would be pros and cons to working in-house, these mirror those for the company really. Pro: billing targets are not an issue, you don't have to log every second of your day. Pro: you can become highly specialised in an industry, making you ultra employable in that industry. Con: you are ultra specialised, and the industry collapses. Con: less variety of work. Pro: you might get to travel with your work to help different branches.
There's a lot of good points, but I think if you go into in-house first, you'll struggle to get out into private practice (short of setting up yourself) if things go wrong or it's not for you.
Pay depends on sector, experience and so forth.
Figures in England say £50k - £65k for 0-2 years experience, rising to £75k - £100k for 6 years and up to around £145k for director level. This figures don't include bonuses, which a typical package for the top directors being £275k.
2009 US figures say $ 65k to start and finishing up on $ 218k after 10-12 years experience.
Not sure I trust the English figures, although UK lawyers are the highest paid in Europe.
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