“As an in-house lawyer, I felt isolated. A community helped me gain joy, insight and connection”

Lonely. Isolated. Re-inventing the wheel. That’s how I felt once I’d landed my first in-house role at a global e-commerce business. I’d gone through a pretty classic route to get there – four years post-qualifying at Clifford Chance and a secondment in-house.

I loved many aspects of my job, so it was a surprise to find I felt this way. I was surrounded by a great mix of people in different functions, all with slightly different ways of looking at the world.

I enjoyed seeing the impact of my work over a longer period, which you don’t often get to see in private practice. I could follow business decisions from the initial strategic discussion through the entire process, bringing in a law firm to help and the consequences of the deal afterwards.

Conversely, in a law firm very often you’re only involved in a particular bit of whatever you're working on. For a dispute lawyer, it’s when things get out of control. For a merger and acquisitions lawyer, it might be that lawyers are brought in to get a deal across the line. People sign and then you go away. You don’t often see what happens next.

But I felt I was missing something. And I suspected other in-house lawyers might be feeling the same way. As an in-house lawyer, you can understand your organisation well, but you might think, "This situation feels weird to me. Have other people gone through this?”

I thought my life and the legal function would be better if I was part of a community of other in-house lawyers who were doing similar things to me. I wanted to do something to make sure that they too didn’t feel lonely, isolated and that they were re-inventing the wheel.

Counsel and connection

So the Crafty Counsel community was born, which centres around joy, insight and connection. We run events, such as our recent roundtable on ethics, several conferences and a legal tech exhibition. We also have a ‘community hub' or message board, job search and run an annual festival called Crafty Fest.

Someone described our community hub as like ‘Reddit for lawyers’. We cover everything. People bring their niche, technical questions, or go there to sense-check a problem. Some might ask for recommendations for external counsel with a particular set of expertise, or need help with template contracts.

People chip in with their reflections and help each other. It is a place where people can get emotional support on something they’re dealing with, such as stress, burnout or feeling drained from a difficult negotiation.

Shifts in in-house

In-house has become a bigger and bigger part of the legal sector. In 2012, 19% of solicitors were working in-house, which jumped to 22% in 2022, according to data from the Law Society.

As a potential career choice, working in-house should be in aspiring lawyers’ brains from the time they’re studying, but that’s definitely not true today. The path you’re geared towards as a law student is one that takes you into a firm. And it’s pretty much just firms with talent pipelines who engage with university career fairs because they have a commercial reason for doing so.

But things are shifting. Regulatory and market change has led to many more people starting their careers in-house, as paralegals and apprentices.

The Solicitors Qualifying Exam (SQE) has mixed things up too. By creating a new pathway to qualification, it’s been made easier for in-house people to train aspiring lawyers through the SQE system. A lot of in-house teams have been making use of this route to develop their own talent.

For growing businesses, it makes sense from a commercial perspective to train their own in-house legal teams. The salary competition between firms can make it pretty hard to justify ‘poaching’ their associates.

Finding your next in-house role

As more trainees and apprentices begin their careers in-house, there is a responsibility for senior people in those teams. They need to make sure they are providing the right level of support and development. For any in-house lawyer making a move, do your diligence on the culture of the organisation, relationships with the business, board and expectations of the role.

Something we see in the start-up ecosystem is a company may be eager to hire their first in-house lawyer. But often they have a financial incentive to hire someone a bit more junior. It could be a great opportunity, or someone could end up a bit out of their depth.

We’re also seeing a trend of general counsels (GCs) and mid-level lawyers making a move back into law firms. I think this is a good thing – you need people on the advisory side who have been in the client’s shoes and can provide context.

Lawyers of the future

If I could give my younger self some advice, I’d say “the smartest thing you can do is be very good at a few things, rather than ‘the best’ at one thing”. It’s something I’ve been reflecting on recently. The idea originally came from the successful cartoonist Scott Adams – who described his unique combination of humour, drawing and business-know-how as the reason for his comic strip success (even though, in his view, he wasn’t ‘the best’ in any single one of those things).

From what I’ve experienced, people who have satisfying career paths have some sort of combination of skills rather than being in the top 1% for one skill. As an in-house lawyer, these might be skills or niches adjacent to their core area of practice, in a combination that gives you a unique strength.

I find this thought liberating. It’s giving value to our other interests, which might not have been the primary focus for the first few years of your career. So give yourself permission to go out and explore your wider interests.