It isn’t easy to be a good in-house lawyer, and many factors make it quite difficult. A good in-house lawyer needs skills and tools that aren’t taught at law school, aren’t part of law firm training, and in many cases must be learned independently while in-house. As
“If you want to become a good in-house lawyer you face a number of problems. Let me depress you for a few minutes by describing what some of those problems are: Law school didn’t teach you practical skills…. So it’s not enough to know the law; you have to know how to do useful things with it to solve your organization’s problems….Your next problem is what happens after you graduate from law school. Let’s assume you start working at a law firm. Law firms are good at many things but law firms simply don’t know everything that an in-house counsel needs to know. There are entire areas of skills that are relevant in-house that are not relevant in a law firm. And as we’ve seen, they don’t think it’s their job to train lawyers for in-house practice. So you won’t get your in-house training in a law firm either….”
Source: Why It’s So Hard Being a Good In-house Lawyer at ACC Docket