This is a great article written by lawyers who have crossed over to being in-house counsel.
The role of in-house counsel in South Africa and even in smaller cities like Port Elizabeth are destined to increase.
The most important drivers being the realisation by businesses that bringing legal skills in-house have huge benefits, which are further increased by the fact that a in-house counsel with increased industry specific knowledge becomes a specialist on the field, more specifically the industry within the context of the specific business; it does not get better than that.
The type of work is also different; in house work tends to be more in support of the management team.
In essence the benefits to the business are huge the in-house counsel is completely focused on their business and not driven by fees, but rather by their specific outcomes, which are determined by the business.
In-house counsel tend to have a intense focus on the job at hand, not being distracted by the administrative and marketing side of being in private practice; this means more time is spent on their activities within the business. In essence though you have dropped the situation of external client in the case or private practice for internal clients in the case of team members in the business scenario.
The work of an in-house counsel is seldom something many aspire to. But for those with commercial aspirations or with the ability to transcend the world of private practice into the more integrative world of working within a business – in-house counsel makes a lot of sense.
In Port Elizabeth, South Africa it is very evident that more and more businesses are seeing the need to get legal skills in-house. A common misconception is that law is a discipline which can be read at university and then applied. In reality, a law degree without practice and experience of applying law in practice is very much akin to learning plumbing from a book without actually working with actual substance of what plumbing is.
In-house counsel will also increase as businesses realise that lawyers represent a unique skill set. In general most attorneys have excellent verbal and reasoning skills, coupled with the ability to be task orientated and being able to float with the organogram of the business; makes these fairly rare corporate animals a rare find; but that does not degrade their strategic and operational usefulness to the business.
