How to Get Your Dream In-house Role
Somewhere out there, an in-house lawyer has the job you daydream about. Maybe they advise a business in media, live entertainment or sport, doing legal work close to the very things you would read about, listen to or watch even if nobody were paying you to. The part worth knowing is that many of them did not start there. Plenty spent the first half of their careers somewhere quite different before finding their way in.
Perhaps you are interested in working in the creative industries. Or perhaps there’s another sector you daydream about working in. There are many lawyers sitting in a perfectly respectable role, doing perfectly respectable work, wondering whether they have already missed the turn-off for the industry they care about most. If you are looking at media, music, sport or any other sector that feels slightly guarded from the outside, there will be practical steps you can take to move closer to that role.
The skill is in-house lawyering
Industry experience can be important for some roles. But there is never anything as important as your underlying skillset. That means technical skills, of course, but it also means judgement, pace, resilience, curiosity, emotional intelligence and the ability to help people make decisions when the answer is not neat. Working as an in-house lawyer is very different from private practice lawyering; working in-house in two wholly unrelated industries can, in some situations, require more similar skillsets than working in private practice in the same industry.
In-house legal work is its own discipline. It is not private practice with one client. It requires a different posture. One day you might be working on commercial contracts, the next a dispute, the day after some consumer protection advice. You are expected to understand and help deliver the commercial aim, but without losing your independence. You need to build a network, and that network needs to have absolute faith in you to support them through their most challenging circumstances.
That is the skill. The industry is the context.
Many routes are not linear. Perhaps you are currently working in house in financial services but dream of working in sport. There are lawyers who have walked that path. Remember: there is a great deal to take from each stage of your career from a technical and soft skills perspective. More than that, each of those stages can be genuinely enjoyable. Financial services need not be a wrong turn before you find the right road. It can be valuable, demanding and often fascinating. It can make you a better lawyer. It can also give you credibility later, because regulated industries teach habits that are useful almost everywhere, such as clarity, accountability, stakeholder management and the ability to discern the real risks in a particular situation.
If you are trying to move sectors, do not stress about where you are now. Excavate it. Work out what your current role is teaching you that another industry will value. Whether you are currently in private practice or in-house, there will be something.
Invest in yourself
So you are developing your most marketable skill – your ability to be a good in-house lawyer. Great start. What else can you do? Again, there are always opportunities. If you really want to move into a competitive industry, that might mean you need to invest in yourself.
That investment could be formal, like pursuing further sector-specific education in your spare time, or it could be informal, simple and free: reading the trade press, following the disputes, understanding the revenue models. You should learn who the major players are, where the money comes from, what is changing and where your skills and experiences fit into that.
Investing in yourself also means developing the cross-cutting skills you think are required for the job you ultimately want. That could mean volunteering for additional tasks in your current role (if you are already in-house, then the nature of the job means there will probably be opportunities to do something new if you want to). Most sectors overlap. A financial services business buys advertising, sponsors events, uses agencies, licenses software, handles customer data, manages brands, creates content, procures technology and deals with regulators. Look for the work in your current role that points towards the work you want next and accrete.
You could also try volunteering. Lawyers’ skills and experiences can be very valuable; chances are there will be a grassroots business that would benefit from your input whilst giving you some practical insight into your target industry.
And, although this is often an overlooked strategy, you could also try networking. You don’t need to go and ‘work a room’, but attending events you are interested in and trying to build genuine connections with people is a good idea. Even if it doesn’t end up in a job (and it likely won’t in a direct sense), there’s a lot of value in simply being in rooms full of like-minded people who are doing the thing you want to do.
Go Long
If you are serious about a particular sector or role, you might need to play the long game. You might not be able to go from private practice financial services regulatory lawyer to head of legal in a media company in one jump. In fact, you almost certainly won’t.
That may sound discouraging. It should not. It is liberating. It means every step does not need to be the perfect step. You can take an adjacent role. You can build a missing skill. You can move to a company that is closer to the sector.
Careers are often less like ladders and more like maps in video games. Sometimes you need to go on a sidequest to unlock a skill before you can move on.
There will be knock-backs
Even if you do everything right, you will get knockbacks. Everyone does.
Applications that go nowhere. Conversations that sound promising and then vanish. Processes where you get close but do not get the role. Jobs where someone else has more direct experience. Opportunities that come at the wrong time. Moments when you wonder whether the move is realistic, or even right.
That is normal. It is the nature of progress that you’ll hear no more often than you hear yes, because you only need to hear yes once. As a lawyer, you’ll already have built some serious resilience skills, because the industry as a whole can be tough.
There is of course a balance to strike. You should pursue the role you want with seriousness, but you should not build your entire identity around getting it. Dream jobs are, by their nature, competitive. That is not a reason to give up, of course. But it is a reason to build a life and career that are not dependent on one particular outcome.
You may also have to leave good jobs. That is often the reality. To develop the pathway you want, you may have to leave good, fulfilling and stable jobs. That is difficult. It means giving up colleagues you like, credibility you have built, routines that work and institutions that understand your value. It means accepting risk.
There is a temptation to tell career stories as if every move was obvious in hindsight. It rarely feels obvious at the time. Sometimes you are choosing between a known good thing and an uncertain, potentially better thing.
Remember it is still just a job
This is important. Working in the creative industries can be brilliant. It can be energising, varied and genuinely fun. You get to work with brilliant people. There are days when the work is close to culture, talent, stories, audiences and moments that matter to people. That is such a privilege.
But it is still a job.
There are contracts, disputes, policies, budgets, deadlines, restructures, difficult stakeholders, technology problems, procurement issues and meetings that should have been emails. There are urgent requests that are not urgent. There are exciting projects with unexciting legal issues. There are famous names attached to mundane problems. A stack of paperwork is still a stack of paperwork.
This is not meant to put you off, but to make you more realistic. The best reason to work in a sector is not that it looks impressive from the outside. It is that the work, the business model, the people and the problems suit you. If you were sold the dream of sexy lawyering by Suits or Ally McBeal, working in glamorous industries still won’t deliver it. You’ll still be a lawyer attached to a desk for the vast majority of your time. (That having been said, it is typically true that dream jobs do tend to see the more prosaic matters punctuated with cool, pinch yourself moments. As Badly Drawn Boy sang: The joy is not the same without the pain.)
The privilege is the work
So, someone has your dream job. Perhaps. But the real privilege is being an in-house lawyer at all. That is the thread running through all of this: the chance to be close to a business, to understand what it is trying to achieve and to help it get there well. When you get to do that in industries you care about, with people whose work reaches readers, audiences, supporters and fans, it is hard not to feel very lucky.
It is a privilege to be close to a business and trusted with its problems. It is a privilege to help shape decisions. It is a privilege to work with people who are excellent at the things they do and to help them achieve their objectives. It is a privilege to learn an industry from the inside. It is a privilege to be useful.
And it is easy to love. There is the variety, the people, the proximity to creative and commercial decisions and the fact that the work often sits close to things people genuinely care about. The job is not glamorous every day, because no job is. But it is interesting, demanding and often enormous fun. It is a role we should feel very lucky to do.
So, if you want to move into media, music, sport or any other industry that has always felt slightly out of reach, do not assume the door is closed. It may not open quickly. It may not open in the way you expect. You may need to build the path yourself, step by step, while doing your current job properly and well.
Start with the craft. Become an excellent in-house lawyer. Learn the industry. Build relationships. Take the relevant work where you are. Make incremental steps. Keep going. If you get there, you may find the same: that the dream job is still a job, but it can also be a wonderful one.
Over to you…
Nobody hands you a dream job, and few careers arrive fully formed. But the sector you daydream about is rarely as closed as it looks from the outside, and the skills you are building right now travel further than you might think. Be patient, be curious, and keep making the small, deliberate moves that bring the work you want within reach. The rest is up to you.