What in-house legal counsel do
A growing share of solicitors work not in law firms but inside companies, charities and public bodies. How the in-house role differs from private practice, and why privilege is trickier when your only client is your employer.
A large and growing part of the profession does not work in law firms at all. In-house lawyers are employed directly by the organisations they advise, whether a company, a bank, a charity, a government department or a local authority, and they sit within the business rather than selling their services to it. The senior in-house lawyer is often titled general counsel, and in many organisations reports at or near board level, blending legal judgement with a close understanding of the employer’s commercial or public purpose.
The day-to-day work is different in texture from private practice. An in-house lawyer typically has a single client, their employer, and advises across whatever that organisation happens to be doing: contracts, disputes, regulation, employment questions, corporate transactions, governance. Where a firm brings in outside expertise for a defined matter and then departs, the in-house lawyer is present continuously, seeing decisions form and helping shape them before they harden into legal problems. Much of the value is preventive, and much of it is about translating legal risk into terms the business can act on.
Crucially, an in-house solicitor is regulated in the same way as any other. The SRA’s Standards and Regulations apply to solicitors whether they practise in a firm or in-house, and an employed solicitor who is practising is expected to hold a current practising certificate. That regulated status carries professional duties that do not bend to the employer’s convenience: an obligation to act with independence and integrity, and not to allow the fact that the employer signs the pay cheque to compromise the lawyer’s professional judgement. The SRA has issued guidance precisely because those duties can feel in tension with the pressures of being an employee.
Legal professional privilege is where the in-house position becomes genuinely more complicated than in a firm. Advice given by an in-house solicitor can attract privilege in the same way as advice from an external lawyer, but the boundaries are harder to hold. In-house lawyers frequently wear more than one hat, giving commercial as well as legal advice, and privilege protects the legal advice, not business advice dressed up as legal. Where the roles blur, a court may find that a communication was really commercial in nature and not protected at all, which is why the SRA and the courts stress keeping legal and non-legal functions as distinct as possible and being clear about when a lawyer is advising as a lawyer.
For the organisations that employ them, in-house counsel offer legal expertise woven into the fabric of the business, available at once and steeped in the context. For the lawyers themselves, the role trades the fee pressures of private practice for a different discipline: staying independent, and visibly a lawyer, while being part of the very organisation whose decisions they are there to test.