What do you like most about being in-house counsel?
Rees Morrison at Law Department Management recently discussed to InsideCounsel’s March 2010 survey:
What is the single greatest advantage of working as in-house counsel?
32.4% Work-life balance
24.5% Exposure to the business side
17.4% Variety of legal work
12.5% Working for one client
4.6% Job security
3.7% Management opportunities
1.8% Pay and benefits
1.6% Career advancement opportunities
1.5% My colleagues
In any survey, I tend to be most fascinated with the “meta” issues, like the survey format, the wording, the options not offered. For example, as Morrison notes, offering “variety” as an option but not “sophistication” implicitly assumes that sophisticated legal work remains the province of law firms.
All of the options are presented as positives. In other words, none of the options describes a problem of law firm life that we avoid as in-house counsel. If the survey options included “Don’t have to track my life in six-minute increments” or “Not being judged by billable hours and collections”, I suspect the results would be quite different.