The life of an in-house counsel can be a lonely one. You’re often the only adult in a sea of children whose mentality of “sign now, figure out binding consequences later” can wear on you. Life is full of constant, often unpleasant surprises. And whether you’re of the good cop or bad cop philosophy, the point is you’re the cop. The law. The heavy. The ministry of no.
It’s critically important that you have yourself a squad.
I know what you’re thinking. Kay is really scraping the barrel if she’s writing a column about the importance of having friends. The end is nigh. Rest assured, I’m not going to sit here and wax poetic about the touchy feels aspects of having some lifelong legal friends to grow old and crotchety with. Rather, I’m here to extoll the importance of the perspective that a squad offers.
And that perspective is this: You are not crazy. It’s everybody around you.
By no means were my years in Biglaw particularly happy ones, but damn it, I had a squad. At any time of day or night, I could walk into the office of this kid in my summer class, who I nicknamed the Vampire, because the guy never slept. Or ate. Or went outside. But man, was he the smartest guy in my class and I could bounce any Reg S conundrum off him.
And when he wasn’t around (which was rare), there was a counsel down the hall, passed over by the partners, but adored by the associates because despite being quite brilliant, he had a way of explaining deals and documents without ever making you feel like a moron. That and he wore a Pepto pink bunny onesie around the office to offer the proverbial finger to the partners one memorable Halloween. There really is nothing quite like the visual of a six foot tall jacked guy walking the hallowed halls of an old money law firm in a bunny suit.
Between the Vampire and the Man Bunny, these two kept me well-informed and sane. Be it an obscure question about notaires in Luxembourg or assuring me that the head merger partner really was just a douche who marked up everybody’s merger agreement that way, these guys were always there for me.
When I went in-house, I buried myself in my new life and it was several months before I realized that I was absolutely miserable. I wasn’t used to people not liking me. Or feeding me total BS all the time. I started to wonder if I was a bad attorney. Or had an unfortunate, previously undetected social disease.
Of course, I said nothing to the Vampire and the Man Bunny, because as much as they’d been there for me in Biglaw, I didn’t want to admit to them I was floundering in the fairy tale in-house cush job. So I carried on, off-balance and constantly second guessing all of my decisions.
It wasn’t until I had drinks with Mel, a law school buddy and fellow in-house counsel in the trenches, listening to her recount the quarter end practices of her marketing department that I realized that good god, marketing people are the same everywhere. They are policy-skirting, responsibility-shirking weasels. (Except that hers attempted to bribe her with wine. I’m still mad about this. I’ve never once been bribed with wine in exchange for getting deals done. What the heck is wrong with my business people?)
And it wasn’t just marketing. It was our revolving door C-suites and money-burning sales teams and our Ugg wearing, Kardashian worshipping HR departments. Company-wide policies gone wrong. Lay-offs. As we swapped war stories about some of the dumbest shit we’d fallen for, putting aside our professional pride to vie for the most gullible counsel of the year award, it occurred to me that through the simple, unintentional act of cutting myself off from other attorneys, I’d allow the business to get in my head.
Of course, two’s not much of a squad, so mine expanded to include a former lawyer turned legal librarian, and an heir to the Biglaw real estate department partnership throne. We couldn’t be more different in terms of career paths, but it only serves to prove the point that your squad doesn’t have to be in-house counsel lawyers (though it helps if there’s someone as wild-eyed in the group as you are). You just need people you can be honest with, who listen and help normalize your day to day weirdness by reminding you that business people and clients are the same everywhere, whether you’re in biotech or utilities, a public company or an educational institution. Business people drive the bottom line. And by extension, will drive you nuts.
You can’t beat them. You shouldn’t join them. So you may as well as find yourself a squad to hang around and hang in there with.
Kay Thrace (not her real name) is a harried in-house counsel at a well-known company that everyone loves to hate. When not scuffing dirt on the sacrosanct line between business and the law, Kay enjoys pub trivia domination and eradicating incorrect usage of the Oxford comma. You can contact her by email at KayThraceATL@gmail.com or follow her on Twitter @KayThrace.
#SquadGoals: The Key To Surviving As In-House Counsel curated from Above the Law
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