<p>forgive me if this has been asked before, but i ran a search and did not find anything.</p>
<p>i am a 1L and am starting to think about possible career paths. i think i would like to go in-house eventually after doing biglaw, and was wondering if in-house positions care which practice group you were in. would any give you an advantage for later going in house?</p>
<p>i was also wondering if any of the practice areas are known to be more stressful/require more hours. from what i heard m&a is the busiest and taxation is the least stressful. is this true? are any other practice areas known for anything?</p>
<p>ERISA and Employee Benefits</p>
<p>Basically Pension Law. Very specialized. Low stress</p>
<p>When corporations hire people for in-house positions, they want the new hires to have expertise in the area in which they’ll be practicing in-house.</p>
<p>The ideal candidate for most in-house positions is someone who spent time in a Biglaw position, but isn’t coming directly from Biglaw. We generally prefer to hire people from other in-house positions. There’s a cultural adjustment to make when going from a law firm to an in-house position, and those of us hiring for in-law positions prefer candidates who have already experienced that adjustment.</p>
<p>The in-house departments I have worked for have generally had an IP group, a mergers and acquisitions group, a modest number of HR attorneys, someone who manages litigation, and a group of transactions attorneys who draft form agreements and negotiate contracts for the particular business the company is in. In the software industry, where I work, that last group is generally equal in size to all other groups combined. (The mix is different in other industries. Retail companies tend to employ a lot of real estate attorneys, for example.)</p>
<p>I agree with Greybeard. </p>
<p>Sometimes, you have little control over the practice area that you join in a “biglaw” firm. You fill the need they have. If you have a choice over the next few years, I think good bets would be health care, technology and securities regulation. Litigation would be low on my list if I were planning for an in house career.</p>
<p>And I agree with cartera45 on litigation being a poor choice for in-house careers. </p>
<p>People who litigate with Biglaw firms are the most likely to burn out there and want to go in-house. My current employer (a Fortune 1000 company) has a single attorney who manages litigation, out of maybe 40 attorneys.</p>
<p>I personally feel that transaction attorneys are well served by having spent some time as a litigator. That doesn’t mean that I’d hire a transaction attorney straight out of a Biglaw litigation department, however.</p>