How to Hire an In-House Attorney

Is your company beginning to grow at a rapid rate and running into more and more legal issues every day? If so, you may want to consider hiring an in-house attorney to help you out.

According to a recent report, economic and public health issues have forced many companies to retain an in-house lawyer over the last couple of years. It might be a good idea for your company to invest in an in-house counsel sometime soon.

Before you bring a small business lawyer on board to work for you, though, you should figure out how to go about hiring one. It should help you locate the right business legal counsel for the job.

Keep reading to get more information on how to hire an in-house attorney that you’ll love.

Make Sure You Need an In-House Attorney

Hiring an in-house attorney will be very helpful. But it’s also going to be a relatively large expense in the grand scheme of things. So prior to conducting a search for one, you should be sure it’s necessary.

If you only need to call on your current lawyer for help every so often, you might be able to keep up this arrangement. It’ll work well for you for the time being.

But if you’re contacting your current lawyer every couple of hours and racking up a huge bill at the end of each month, that might be reason enough to look around for an in-house attorney.

Look for a Local Legal Headhunter

If you just so happen to know some lawyers who might be good for your in-house attorney position, you should consider hiring one of them to help you. But otherwise, you’ll need to think about working with a local legal headhunter to track down interested candidates.

Sure, you could go ahead and create a job listing for an in-house attorney yourself and take that approach. But it’s going to be a very time-consuming process.

You’ll be so much better off letting a legal headhunter find people who would be right for the position you need to fill. It’ll take a lot of the heavy lifting off your plate and let you continue to focus on running your business.

Interview a Handful of In-House Attorneys

A legal headhunter might push for one particular lawyer over all the rest. But even still, you should make it a point to interview at least a small handful of attorneys for your in-house attorney position.

The in-house general counsel you hire is going to be working side by side with you each and every day. So you don’t want to get stuck with a lawyer that you don’t like as much as your legal headhunter did.

It would be well worth interviewing as many attorneys as you can for the role you’re trying to fill. It should help you land on a couple that you really like over all the rest.

Find a Small Business Lawyer That Knows Your Industry

Even if a small business lawyer doesn’t have a ton of experience within your industry, they should still be able to help you out. But in a perfect world, you want to hire an in-house attorney that is familiar with your industry and the challenges you might face.

A lawyer like this is going to be able to give you much better legal advice overall. They’re also going to be able to provide you with legal advice quicker than they might be able to otherwise.

You might want to let your legal headhunter know you’d like someone with experience in your industry from the very beginning.

Consider the Costs Associated With In-House Attorneys

The average in-house counsel is going to cost your company somewhere in the $250,000 range. But there will be certain attorneys that will accept less than this and others that will push for more.

Before you begin interviewing candidates, you should have some sense of what you’re going to be willing to pay an in-house attorney. It could help your legal headhunter to weed out some candidates who might not be good fits as far as salary is concerned.

This might also provide you with another opportunity to make sure that hiring an in-house attorney makes sense in the first place. It’s going to require a large financial commitment on your part

Hire the Best In-House Counsel for the Job

When you reach this point in your search for an in-house attorney, you should have a really good idea of which lawyer is going to be your best option. You can make them an offer and ask them if they would like to join your company.

As long as they’re up for the challenge, you can make things official and get them all signed up. They’ll be able to begin providing you with the legal advice that you’ll need to take your company to the next level.

Start Searching for an In-House Lawyer Now

As we’ve emphasized a few times now, an in-house attorney is going to cost you a pretty penny. So you shouldn’t make any rushed decisions when hiring one to work for you.

Follow the steps laid out here and you should be able to find an in-house counsel that will benefit your business in a big way. It’ll make creating a general counsel position worth it in the end.

Read more of the legal articles that are posted on our blog to get additional tips and tricks on hiring lawyers.

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