This article is written by Ramanuj Mukherjee, CEO, LawSikho.

In-house counsel jobs are super attractive, but most in-house legal teams do not want to hire a fresher. I have written about why that happens before in great detail. Today I will restrict myself to how freshers who want to work in in-house legal teams can still manage to get a job with a top in-house legal team. 

I am assuming if you are reading this you are probably convinced that in-house law jobs are attractive and not inferior to law firm jobs. If not, perhaps you should read this.

There are several companies with very large legal teams, such as ICICI Bank, SREI, ITC, Reliance, etc. who do not hesitate to hire freshers, because if there is a large legal team in place it is easier to absorb the pressure of training the freshers. 

Any large in-house legal team is a potential candidate for hiring freshers. 

However, most of these have favorite campuses to hire from. It is hard to land these jobs unless you are studying in those specific colleges. 

There are also PSUs that hire freshers for in-house positions. These are quite lucrative, to be honest. However, most of these hire freshers based on CLAT LLM results or some other tests.

These opportunities, to be honest, perhaps are not open to all. What is the alternative?

Remember, they do not hire freshers because they do not want to train rookie lawyers. They are ready to pay higher to lawyers who are already trained.

What if you could show them that you already know the work that they need their lawyers to do? That you need no training for them?

That changes the equation in your favor. 

The best way to do this is to intern with them long term, and perform so well that they realize that you need no training! This is harder to pull off in just 15 days or 30 days of internship. 

So yes, long term internships would be the most useful tool in the bag of a law student who wants to get into an in-house legal team right out of college. 

There are 4 most important types of work that in-house counsels have to do – contracts, compliances, policy advocacy, and litigation.

Contract drafting is the top skill. A huge chunk of work that in-house counsels have to do involves either drafting, negotiating or enforcing contracts. Being good at contract drafting and negotiation ensures that you are very useful in an in-house legal team.

Compliance is another critical area of work. Having good knowledge of statutory compliances will make you an attractive hire for in-house legal departments. If you heard from a lawyer that doing CS helps in getting an in-house legal team job in a company, that is because CS is all about compliances. It is not necessary to do CS to learn about compliances, and it is a fairly easy skill to pick up.

Click Above

Policy advocacy is increasingly becoming an important area of work for top-level in-house lawyers. You have to engage with the government, politicians, and bureaucrats and put across policy positions that would be important for your company, and also persuade them to not implement or change policies that may hurt the future of your business.  

Not all companies have policy work for in-house teams. However, in tech companies and certain other industries which are highly regulated, such as tobacco, alcohol, transport, insurance policy work is critical.

Litigation is the other major area of work for in-house lawyers. While they cannot appear before court themselves, they often manage litigation in different courts and instruct the litigators. They may draft documents, strategize with inputs from outside counsels and make critical strategic decisions. 

Sometimes in-house lawyers may be hired for a specific skill or kind of work too, such as acquisitions, or negotiating loan transactions, handling consumer litigation, labor and employment law or recovering money through the IBC.

While creating our course called Business Law for In-house Counsels, we researched extensively on what are the laws and skills that are more sought after amongst generalist in-house lawyers. If you check out the syllabus by scrolling down, you can access what we found to be the most relevant skills that give an edge to in-house counsels in their day-to-day work.

While you are a law student or a very young lawyer, I recommend that you try working with small startups and SMEs with 10-30 employees. Most of them do not have a legal team but enough legal work for you to get started. 

They find lawyers expensive and will be willing to take a chance on letting you work. You can offer to work or intern for free for a while, and begin to help them out with contracts and compliances. 

As you begin to add value, they will see how your work is really useful for them, and that would lead to you getting a job or retainership offer. If nothing else, you will get very valuable experience as well as build a network of professional connections that would go a long way in giving a boost to your career.

It is important to build up your profile over a period of time. It may be very hard to get a job in a big company right at the beginning. There are after all only a handful of positions, and if it is harder to get a job in a top law firm which has hundreds of open positions in a year, imagine how much harder it would be to get through an in-house legal team that has only 10 or less open positions in a year!

The key is to create a strong profile over the years, and have a strong network amongst the existing employees in those companies. 

You can start by working for small tech companies, and move to bigger and more premium tech companies based on your reputation for the good work you have done.

Writing articles, visibility on social media and the legal community, personal relationship with other lawyers – these things are all critical for your long term growth. 

You need to think and plan long term, not just what you are going to do for the very next job.

How can we help you to get your first in-house legal counsel job?

• Skill development: learn the practical skills that you need for doing in-house legal work successfully
• CV building – we will help you to make a great CV, especially as you will write and publish articles while doing our courses
• Job and internship support – we will help you to connect with potential internship and job opportunities and if you do good work in the course, we will even recommend you for suitable jobs
• Work resources – you will get access to a library of documents, templates, formats, checklists and how-to guides that would help you to outperform everyone else at work, ensuring you get the jobs and promotions you aim for

Here is the course we recommend for those who want to work as in-house counsels.

Here are some courses that you can consider enrolling into:

DIPLOMA 

Diploma in Business Laws for In House Counsels

Diploma in Companies Act, Corporate Governance and SEBI Regulations

EXECUTIVE CERTIFICATE COURSES

Certificate Course in Advanced Corporate Taxation

Certificate Course in Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code

Certificate Course in Advanced Civil Litigation: Practice, Procedure and Drafting

Certificate Course in National Company Law Tribunal (NCLT) Litigation

Certificate Course in Arbitration: Strategy, Procedure and Drafting

Students of Lawsikho courses regularly produce writing assignments and work on practical exercises as a part of their coursework and develop themselves in real-life practical skill.

LawSikho has created a telegram group for exchanging legal knowledge, referrals and various opportunities. You can click on this link and join: