AttorneyMentoring.com In-House Attorneys

Skills Necessary to Succeed In-House

Aside from basic legal skills, in-house lawyers need to develop business
and management skills to interact successfully with their business peers.
They need to learn to communicate in an environment where they are the
minority. They need to be pro-active about establishing systems that avoid
problems arising while not creating obstacles to the company's
achievement of its business goals.

One way to start is to learn as much as possible about the operations of
the business, from the bottom up. The more information that in-house
counsel has, the better prepared he or she will be to address issues
before they manifest into legal entanglements. We will discuss this issue
from a mentoring perspective in greater detail in articles to come. In
addition we will focus on how best to manage the increased levels of
management

Firm versus In-house

There are stark differences between working at a law firm and
working in-house. The first obvious difference is that the
business of a law firm is practicing law and everyone within the
firm is involved in the same activity or supporting that activity.
Firm lawyers juggle multiple clients and generally very diverse
industries and matters simultaneously. They are often required
to specialize fairly early on and serve a practice group or area
of law. In-house lawyers, on the other hand, while they may
start in a specialized area generally advance by exhibiting
general counsel skills over their specialization.

In contrast, the in-house lawyer, while practicing law, is
ultimately employed by business executives and shareholders,
requiring a balance of legal and business skills to varying
degree.

In-house environments tend to be more structured and follow a
corporate model whereas law firms still remain in a hybrid
partnership model of one kind or another. Project management
is an important aspect of in-house law departments as they
interact with their business units.

All this being said, neither environment is more or less favorable
(although some in-house positions might offer a better life-style
than some law firm environments) but each requires more
emphasis in one area than another.

A Lawyer's Emotional Intelligence Can Be a Better Predictor of Superior Performance Than
Their IQ; How Lawyers Can Raise Their Emotional Intelligence

A well-known work performance based theory known as "Emotional Intelligence (EI)" and "Emotional Intelligence Quotient
(EIQ)" has been proven in numerous studies to distinguish superior performers from average performers.

Lawyers like other highly skilled and educated professionals, have relatively high IQ's and have attained a certain level of
career success as a result.   However, their law school training did not address emotional intelligence competencies.
Some would argue, that law school and some law firm environments may actually repress certain emotional
competencies.    EIQ (also known as EIC) has been shown to directly impact performance results and increase
interpersonal effectiveness, including influencing clients, improving management skills, increasing revenue generating
capacity and overall improving employees' financial performance. This has been shown to be even more significant in
highly skilled professions such as law.

Two types of personal emotional intelligence, intra and inter, combine to form EIQ.   In his book, “Working with Emotional
Intelligence”, Daniel Goleman described the following five* clusters to emotional intelligence:

Self-Awareness.
Self-Management.
Self-Motivation.
Social Awareness.
Relationship Management.

(*While the 5-cluster model has since been consolidated into a 4-cluster model excluding a separate Self-Motivation cluster that tends to overlap with other
clusters, we will use the original 5-cluster model for the purposes of providing tips later in this article.)

Low EIQ is one reason that otherwise brilliant Lawyers do not achieve their potential.   There are countless examples of
Lawyers with the technical know-how and experience who never achieve Partnership or who are unable to effectively deal
with their colleagues and clients.   With more awareness of one's emotional competencies and the correlation between
higher EIQ and personal and professional performance, one can activate certain learned behavior that directly influences
others, improves performance, attracts more business, and generally reduces workplace stress.

While individual IQ's are somewhat fixed, the potential for increasing one's EIQ is open ended and, therefore
implementation of a few key strategies can directly increase a Lawyer's overall performance relatively easily.

Click here for a table of competencies and action items for lawyers designed to increase their emotional intelligence.