Every legal interview has two halves. In the first, they ask the questions and you try not to ramble. In the second, they lean back and say “So, what questions do you have for us?” and a surprising number of very good lawyers freeze. If you are interviewing for in-house counsel jobs, both halves matter, and the people who do this for a living – legal recruiters, talent chiefs and career coaches – agree on more than you might think about how to handle them.
How An In-House Interview Is Different
An in-house interview is not a law firm interview with nicer coffee. At a firm you meet lawyers almost exclusively. In-house, you are likely to start with a screening call from HR, then meet the legal department, and then sit down with executives from the parts of the business you would support. Depending on the size of the company, you may or may not meet the General Counsel along the way.
Those business leaders are listening for something different from the lawyers. Legal recruiter Valerie Fontaine of SeltzerFontaine, in a piece she shared with InhouseBlog®, explained why it changes everything about how you should present yourself:
“When practicing in a law firm, you’re a revenue generator since the firm’s business is law. As an in-house lawyer, you’re part of overhead because you’re not engaged in producing the product or service the company sells in the marketplace.”
— Valerie Fontaine, legal recruiter
So the executives across the table want to know two things: how you will help the business grow, and how you will keep legal costs down. Walk in having thought about their business goals and their legal problems, and connect each line of your resume to what the company actually needs.
Start By Researching Yourself
Everyone knows to research the company: the leadership team, recent acquisitions or restructurings, the products, the press. If a recruiter is involved, press them for the format (a panel or a string of one-on-ones) and for the personalities you will meet. But recruiters who prep in-house candidates every week say that is the easy half. Princeton Legal Search Group, in an article it shared with InhouseBlog®, put it bluntly:
“As radical as it may sound, I really believe that it is better to spend more time researching yourself than researching the company. Unfortunately, too many lawyers focus more on researching the company than researching their own talents, weaknesses, and motivations.”
— Princeton Legal Search Group
Make sure your resume tells the same story you will tell in the room; see our in-house counsel resume guide. For the full search, see how to get an in-house counsel job.
Researching yourself means knowing exactly what your resume says, down to the article you published years ago and the hobbies you listed, because interviewers read those lines and ask about them. It means checking that your firm bio and LinkedIn profile tell the same story as your resume. And it means being able to explain every career move briefly and without apologizing, including the ones that did not work out. There was a reason for each move when you made it; say what it added to your skills, and if one simply did not pan out, say so. Hindsight is 20/20, and every interviewer has a job they would rather forget.
Legal Interview Questions You Will Be Asked
The wording changes from company to company, but in-house interviewers keep circling back to the same handful of questions. The first is almost always some version of “Why do you want to move in-house?” or “Why this company?” It sounds like a softball. It is not. Fontaine calls it the trickiest question you will face when moving from a firm:
“Never say you’re looking for a ‘lifestyle change!’ While it’s true that jettisoning billable hours and rainmaking pressures are attractive features of the switch, corporate counsel understandably are wary of anyone who signals a desire for an easier job.”
— Valerie Fontaine, legal recruiter
Better answers point toward the work, not away from your current job: the chance to serve one client instead of many, to understand a business deeply enough to build solutions that make long-term sense, to follow a deal from conception through completion, or real interest in what the company makes or does. Be genuine about it. Interviewers can tell the difference between passion for the mission and passion for leaving at six o’clock.
Next comes “Walk me through your career” and its close cousin, “Describe what you do day to day.” Keep the career walk to a couple of minutes and focus on the logic behind each move. The day-to-day question is where good candidates quietly lose offers by staying vague. Give specifics: deal sizes, contract types, how many matters you run, who you report to, what you own outright. Princeton Legal Search Group hears the same thing from hiring companies again and again:
“Over and over, I have my client-companies tell me that they want to really understand the depth of a candidate’s experience. Worry less that you may be ‘light’ in a certain area of expertise, and worry more that you are not accurately explaining where your strength lies.”
— Princeton Legal Search Group
The Behavioral Questions
Then the interview turns to stories. “Tell me about a time you had to tell the business no.” “Tell me about a time you disagreed with a supervisor.” “How did you handle a deadline you missed?” These behavioral questions are far more common in-house than at law firms, and they are not designed to trap you. The thinking is simple: how you handled things before is the best predictor of how you will handle them on this team. So walk in with a few real stories ready, good and bad, and land each one on what it says about how you work.
The “telling the business no” story is the in-house question. The best answers show how you got to a workable yes: you explained the risk in business terms, offered an alternative and kept the relationship intact. For a mistake, own it quickly and spend most of the answer on how you fixed it and what changed afterward. And when the weakness question comes, skip “I work too hard.” As Princeton Legal Search Group noted, interviewers want to see “whether you are awake enough to identify them and brave enough to admit them.”
Two more questions come up often enough in legal departments to prepare for. “How do you decide when to bring in outside counsel?” is really a question about judgment and budget, so talk about what you keep in-house, what you send out, how you choose firms and how you keep them on budget. “How would you explain this risk to our CEO?” is a test of whether people who do not speak lawyer can understand you. Lead with the business impact, give a recommendation, and skip the string cites.
General Counsel And Senior Role Interview Questions
The higher the role, the more the interview shifts from “Can you do the legal work?” to “Can you lead?” For senior positions, Fontaine says you need to show you can “delegate responsibility, provide feedback, recruit, mentor, and develop talent for current and future roles and, possibly, fire people,” and that you can build and manage a legal budget. If no one has reported to you directly, point to the projects and teams you have led, committees you have chaired, and leadership roles in bar and community organizations.
Career coach Elena Deutsch, founder of WILL – Women Interested in Leaving Law, learned this from a client who landed an in-house interview and did not move forward. The company’s feedback came in three parts: she used up-speak, she talked too much, and she did not listen well enough. In the piece she shared with InhouseBlog®, Deutsch drew the lesson in one line:
“Let me state the obvious: in-house counsel is a leadership role.”
— Elena Deutsch, career coach
Her advice is to know your real strengths and say them plainly – “Don’t BS. They can smell it a mile away” – to raise your hand for leadership roles so you have stories to tell, and to listen more than you talk. Leaders take in information. They do not need to have every answer.
One practical note for senior candidates: it is fine to ask which firms the company uses as outside counsel, but Fontaine warns against asking how much work gets farmed out. You risk sounding like you want a job supervising other lawyers. Assume you will do the heavy lifting, and say so.
The Curveballs
Expect at least one question nobody could have prepared you for. Some interviewers throw them on purpose to see how you think on your feet, which is exactly what in-house work demands when a new problem lands on your desk at 4:55 on a Friday. Fast Company asked career coach Hallie Crawford to work through some real ones, including “If your current employer had an anniversary party for you, what five words would be written on the cake to describe you?” Silly as it sounds, she says it is “designed to reveal how you think your manager perceives you,” and her advice works for most odd questions:
“Before answering, ask yourself: How do your coworkers describe you? What did your manager commend you on recently?”
— Hallie Crawford, career coach
Another of her curveballs is practically an in-house job description: describe a time you made a decision without all the information you needed. Her advice is to pull it from your list of accomplishments and “describe the situation and what information was missing and any measurable results achieved.” The move is the same for every curveball: pause, say how you would approach it, and reason out loud. You are allowed to think before you answer.
Phone And Video Interviews
Most in-house searches now start with a phone screen or a video call, and it is a mistake to treat either as a formality. HR professionals told Glassdoor, in a piece published by Fast Company, that “many companies treat phone screens as the official first round of the hiring process.” Their pet peeves are easy to avoid: take the call somewhere quiet, do not multitask, never put the interviewer on hold, and leave salary for later.
Video adds a few wrinkles of its own. Look into the camera rather than at the screen so you appear to make eye contact, dress exactly as you would in person, and check your lighting and background. Thach Tak Nguyen, who has recruited for Airbnb and Google, told Fast Company about one candidate who took that a step further:
“A candidate once asked if she could do a test run with me to make sure there were no technical hiccups.”
— Thach Tak Nguyen, talent leader
It showed how invested she was, and he says the rapport it built helped later, during the offer negotiation.
Nerves, Habits And The Mistakes That Sink Good Candidates
If your knees knock before an interview, you are in good company. Career expert Liz Ryan, writing in Forbes, makes the case that nerves are the natural response to a strange situation:
“Virtually everyone gets nervous at a job interview sometimes. A job interview is an artificial situation. Everything in it is artificial.”
— Liz Ryan, Forbes
Her cure is preparation: over-prepare, plan the logistics the night before, arrive early, and take notes during the interview so you stay focused on the conversation instead of judging your own performance. Know your own habits, too. If you ramble when you are nervous, plan short answers and stop talking. Watch for the verbal tics and fidgeting that read as unprofessional. And practice out loud. Rehearsing does not make you sound canned; it makes you a sharper version of yourself. Leave room for a little humor while you are at it. Polished and human beats polished and robotic every time.
Answering The Salary Question
Sooner or later someone asks what you are looking for. For years, the standard advice came from career coaches like Molood Noori, who told readers of Inc. to hold the line:
“You have to do everything in your power to refuse answering this question. The rule of the negotiation game is that the first quoted number has to come from the employer. Never from the candidate.”
— Molood Noori, career coach
That instinct still serves you, and so does Noori’s point that you should “stay calm and confident and never get adversarial” while you hold it. But the ground has shifted. A growing number of states and cities, including California, Colorado, New York and Washington, now require employers to post a pay range, and many places bar employers from asking about your salary history at all. The first number is increasingly sitting right there in the job posting.
So do the homework before you walk in: know the posted range if there is one, know the market for the role, and know your own number. When the question comes, it is reasonable to say you are targeting the upper part of the posted range given your experience, or to ask what they have budgeted. And remember that base salary is only one piece of an in-house package. Bonus, equity and title can matter just as much. Our guide on negotiating the in-house job offer covers what to ask for and how.
Questions To Ask In A Legal Interview
Then comes the second half of the interview, the one that trips up so many lawyers. The editors at Vault make the case for taking it seriously:
“It’s important that candidates show an interest in the law firm or organization and treat the interview like a conversation. One of the best ways to do this is by asking thoughtful questions–not just questions whose answers readily appear on the firm’s or organization’s website.”
— Vault Law Editors
Interviewers really do weigh your questions. Sjoerd Gehring, Global Vice President of Talent Acquisition at Johnson & Johnson, shared his favorite candidate questions after roughly 100,000 interviews, as reported by Inc. At the top of the list: “Why does this role matter to the growth of the company?” Here is why it stuck with him:
“This question showed me the candidate was interested in making an impact beyond their role and how they’d fit into the future plans of the business.”
— Sjoerd Gehring, Johnson & Johnson
That is exactly the instinct an in-house interviewer wants to see. A few more questions that work well with a legal department:
- How is the legal department seen by the business, and how would you like that to change?
- What would success look like in this role after six months? After a year?
- Who are this role’s main internal clients, and what do they need most from legal?
- Why is this position open?
- How does the team split work between in-house lawyers and outside counsel?
- What is the biggest legal or regulatory issue on the General Counsel’s desk this year?
- How does the legal team use technology and AI tools today?
- What are the next steps, and when should I expect to hear back?
Read the room and pick three or four. Hold off on too many questions about salary, benefits and exit opportunities this early in the process. And a note to the aspiring comedians: “When do I start?” is rarely the right question to ask.
Why Qualified Candidates Still Get Rejected
You can answer every question well and still not get the offer. Julie Brush, the legal recruiter known as The Lawyer Whisperer, says the most common reason employers give for rejecting candidates is a lack of enthusiasm:
“Employers closely assess and judge candidates on their level of ‘enthusiasm’ for an opportunity – and are unforgiving when a deficiency exists.”
— Julie Brush, The Lawyer Whisperer
Enthusiasm does not mean acting like a game show host. It means showing up alert, curious and knowledgeable about their business, and telling them directly that you want the job. Dale Carnegie had it right back in 1936: “you can make more friends in two months by being interested in them, than in two years making them interested in you.” Most in-house interviewers are really asking three things: can this person do the work, will the business want to call them, and will they fit the team. Curiosity about their business answers all three. Then send a thank-you note.
Red Flags To Watch For
The interview runs both ways. Be wary if no one can describe what success looks like in the role, if the job has turned over several times in a few years, if legal clearly has no seat at the table, or if the interviewers cannot agree on what the job actually is. Ask about it directly. How they answer will tell you a lot.
Ready For The Next Interview?
All of this preparation only pays off if you have an interview to prepare for. Browse current in-house counsel jobs and, if you are aiming higher, Deputy General Counsel jobs and General Counsel jobs, updated daily from GoInhouse.
Legal Interview Questions: Quick Answers
What are the most common in-house counsel interview questions?
Why in-house and why this company, a walk through your career, your day-to-day work in detail, behavioral questions such as a time you told the business no or made a mistake, your biggest weakness, and how you manage outside counsel.
What questions do General Counsel candidates get asked?
Expect the core in-house questions plus leadership: how you build and develop a team, manage a legal budget, choose and manage outside counsel, deliver hard news to executives and the board, and balance legal risk against business goals.
What questions should I ask when interviewing for a lawyer job?
Ask how legal is seen by the business, what success looks like in the first six months, who your main internal clients are, why the role is open, how work is split with outside counsel, and why the role matters to the company’s growth.
How should I answer the salary question in a legal interview?
Know the posted range and the market before you walk in. Aim for the part of the range that fits your experience, or ask what they have budgeted, and remember bonus, equity and title are part of the package.
How do I prepare for a phone or video interview for an in-house job?
Treat it as the first real round. Find a quiet spot, do not multitask, have your notes and questions ready, and for video, look into the camera and check your lighting and background in advance.