Snakes and Ladders: the In-house Career Path
If you’re working towards a career in-house, it’s worth knowing from the start that there isn’t just one route to get there. Unlike private practice, where the steps from trainee > associate > partner are well-defined, in-house legal careers tend to follow a less predictable path. It can take time and sometimes a few detours to find your place. That’s not a drawback. In many ways, it is exactly what makes an in-house career so interesting.
It’s just like playing a game of snakes and ladders. This isn’t a negative analogy! You might find you take one role that pushes you a few steps forward. Your manager encourages you to stretch outside of your comfort zone to build your knowledge and experience. Then, in what might be an unexpected turn of events, you decide to move into a completely different team and have to rewind a few steps back to build up new skills in a different industry or area of law. As long as you’re learning and growing, taking the less linear path will remain rewarding and interesting wherever you go.
The straight line myth
Some lawyers start in-house from day one. Others spend a few years in private practice first. Some make the move later still, after a career in operations, compliance or project management. The truth is that all of these pathways are valid. What matters most is knowing what you want out of your career and being open to learning along the way.
In-house legal teams come in all shapes and sizes. A small start-up might need a generalist who is willing to handle anything that lands on their desk. A mature organisation might have specialists for different areas such as employment, data protection, intellectual property or contracts. Your ‘route in’ will often depend on the type of business you join and the level of experience they need at that moment.
Private Practice Grounding
If you are completing your training contract in private practice, you already have a strong foundation. The technical skills, rigour and attention to detail you learn as a trainee are valuable currency in-house. Many General Counsels look for candidates who can combine that legal discipline with an ability to see the bigger commercial picture.
Spending time in a law firm can also give you a clearer sense of which industries or clients you enjoy working with most. That knowledge often informs the kind of businesses you might later want to join and helps you narrow down your search for the right role.
Learning the Business Side
Once you move/work in-house, your focus shifts from legal output to business impact. You are no longer advising external clients at arm’s length and scoring billable hours. The business is your client and your advice becomes pivotal to the success of it. The context of every project and discussion becomes more important than the legal analysis alone.
A transition can take time. You will find yourself working more closely with finance, operations and product teams than with other lawyers. You will also become the link between what the law allows and what the business wants to achieve. Building confidence in that balance is a defining part of your growth.
Learning the business side also means learning how to work with different departments and key individuals who rely on you for support. You will become a listening ear for many teams in the business who may not always have strictly ‘legal’ questions or concerns to run by you. Rather than seeing yourself as a ‘lawyer’, you’ll start to become the embodiment of ‘counsel’, in all senses of the word. It’s important, therefore, to learn along the way how to navigate complex questions that don’t at first glance appear relevant to your expertise, jump into unexpected, last-minute tasks and pivot and adapt quickly as business priorities change.
Moving horizontally before moving up
Career progression in-house often looks more like a series of horizontal squiggly lines than a defined climb up a single ladder. You might move industries, shift focus from contracts to compliance, or take on a regional role in a global team. These kinds of changes are common and can expand your skill set faster than a straight, vertical path ever could.
Taking on cross-functional projects or secondments can also help you develop range. In-house success is rarely about specialisation alone. It is about understanding how different parts of a business connect and how legal advice fits within that picture. The sooner you expose yourself to that way of thinking, the better. A horizontal move isn’t always negative, it’s important that you define your personal success first before making a judgment.
Managing your own development
Because in-house teams are often smaller, structured training and promotion paths can be less formal or predictable. That means your professional development can be self-driven and rely on your own ambitions to keep the pace.
Keeping on top of regulatory changes (horizon scanning), building contacts across your industry (networking) and maintaining focus on business priorities (commercial awareness) are part of the job.
To do this, you can seek out mentors in other businesses, invest in continuous learning and stay visible internally. Those habits are what can accelerate your career forward, even when the route isn’t clearly mapped out for you.
Over to you…
An in-house career rarely unfolds in a straight line and that’s one of its strengths. The variety of routes in, the diversity of work and the opportunity to grow with a business can make it one of the most rewarding legal career paths available. You might not know what the end goal looks like, but as they say, it’s the journey that’s more important and career-defining than the destination.
Whether you get there directly or take the long way round, the key is to stay curious and remain commercially minded. Your path might be different to others, but it can still lead exactly where you ultimately want to go.