Real Law

Every type of lawyer believes that they are the ones who engage in the true practice of law. To litigators, law is the theater of the courtroom and those who engage in other practices are paper-pushers or desk-jockeys; to M&A specialists, real law is the art of the deal; to appellate practitioners, genuine lawyers are those whose verbal jousting leads to reported decisions; to criminal lawyers, law is exonerating the innocent. All of these perspectives are valid, but for me the in-house practice suits my preference for “applied” law, that is to say the practical application of legal theory to real life business problems in furtherance of maximizing the value and efficiency of an enterprise- that’s the part of law that calls to me the most.

A desk job. Is that all you can see in it? Just a hard chair to park your pants on… Just a pile of papers to shuffle around, and five sharp pencils and a scratch pad to make figures on, with maybe a little doodling on the side. That's not the way I see it... To me a claims man is a surgeon, and that desk is an operating table, and those pencils are scalpels and bone chisels. And those papers are not just forms and statistics and claims for compensation. They're alive, they're packed with drama, with twisted hopes and crooked dreams. A claims man… is a doctor and a blood-hound and a cop and a judge and a jury and a father confessor, all in one.

-Edward G. Robinson as Barton Keyes, Double Indemnity (1944)

Substitute “general counsel” for “claims man” in Edward G. Robinson’s quote and you may understand why I enjoy the practice of in-house law. A corporation houses the world-challenging dreams of management, the wide-eyed hopes for sky-rocket careers, the earnest plans for a stable income, as well as a multitude of other ambitions and desires held by employees, customers, vendors, and shareowners. To be fair, most of these hopes and dreams are neither twisted nor crooked, but they are packed with drama, and this is the theater that in-house lawyers are privileged to be part of.