This article is written by Mohona Thakur from Team iPleaders.

 

Here’s a little something I’d like all of you to know. For most part of my law school years, I interned with the in-house legal teams of companies. 5 out of 8 internships that I did in the half a decade I spent in law school were in house, in the hope that someone would notice my work and willingness to work in house and hand me a job offer!

What initially started as an experiment to figure out what do lawyers in companies do, over the internships culminated into what I wanted to do after law school, and for good reason. Every internship taught me something different, and when I look back I realise I acquired a new skill-set in every internship that in-house lawyers are expected to possess.

For those of you curious or interested to find out what is the kind of work that you are required to do as an in house counsel, or apprehensive about what work would be handed to an intern in a legal company, you would want to proceed and read this article. I’m sure my experiences won’t disappoint you.

Here are the five skills I acquired at the five internships I did with the in-house legal teams of companies:

 

• Contract Drafting and Reviewing

 

To be absolutely honest with you, while I was interning with the legal team at L&T, I was completely clueless about what was expected of me to do. Apart from the quick research that was given to me, I used to spend maximum amount of time in a day reviewing and drafting contracts. These ranged all the way from software licensing agreements, to employment agreements to subscription enterprise agreements to master service agreements.

Barely having studied Law of Contracts I in law school, I was given the task of reviewing 300 page contracts to figure out if the boilerplate clauses were a potential hazard to the business. Back then, I didn’t even know what boilerplate clauses meant, let alone figure out how they would be a conflict with the business. Law schools didn’t teach us these kind of things. What they taught us were Balfour v. Balfour, which was almost never required at the time of contract drafting or reviewing!

Till date law schools have professors with almost negligible practical knowledge teaching us the law of contracts. While they may do a pretty good job at the clearing the basic concepts and making us understand the most important case laws from 1919, what they cannot do is teach us how to draft a contract! Which is why we now see online courses on contract drafting that teach us exactly how to do draft, review a contract through live webinars, industry experts, guidance and feedback sessions!

By the end of this internship, I knew how to review contracts and understand the good and the bad of how a contract could possibly affect a business.

 

• Research

 

When I look back, a month at HT Media is probably one of those defining months of my career as a lawyer. I was quite lucky to have an extremely demanding reporting manager, who was very specific with the research work he gave me. As a second year student, he didn’t expect much of me. In fact, you’d face this everywhere you go – no one takes the first-second year law students at internships seriously.

He began with what he called an easy topic and asked me to take as much time as I needed to come up with a thoroughly researched article, with relevant case laws. Wondering what the research was on? I was asked to figure out if the company could use the national flag of India in an advertisement to be printed in Malaysia. Eventually, the topics became difficult. In the one month I spent there, I had researched on a variety of things ranging from the jurisdiction to file cases under the negotiable instruments act, to the intersection between copyright laws and competition laws, to defamation laws.

While researching came naturally to me, this internship taught me to research on very specific needs of the company. I learnt how to ask questions when stuck, and most importantly to ask the right questions. As in-house counsels, we would be expected to be jack of all trades, but we won’t be expected to know all the laws under the roof. However, we would be expected to figure them out and deliver at the times of need.

If you’re eyeing an in house role, you better be prepared to research on anything under the sun. It would be handy if you had prior knowledge of business or commercial laws. The business law courses available online are a good option to go with if your schedule doesn’t permit you enough time to do a full-time course!

 

• You Work For The Team First, Then For Yourself

 

I believe HUL was the most serene experience. I was here for two months and had a variety of work to do, but what I genuinely took back from this experience was that team work does wonders.

Amongst the many projects that I was working on from Day 0, creating a due-diligence report for all factories, live as well as defunct, in order to ensure that the properties are marketable was one of my major tasks. This involved liaising with various branch teams across the country and ensuring that all agreements were available to be vetted, then vetted, and then all plausible future actions taken to ensure that the properties were marketable!

A four member team, inclusive of me, were working on this project for a month to ensure that not only did we complete the project, but ensure that we do it to the best of our ability. Most of us stayed back at work post work hours to review property agreements, coordinate with branch offices, government offices for mutation documents and collate all documents of probably a hundred factories.

Had it not been for team work, we wouldn’t have been able to complete the work, let alone complete it on time. When you put the work, the team before you, you end up doing a lot more than you could expect to. And companies look at this as an enviable quality. Would you put the team before yourself?

 

• Domain & Industry Knowledge

 

Whether it was HT Media or HUL, by the end of the internship, I could name all the brands under their umbrella, what category they belonged to and what could possibly be the laws that governed those categories. This is expected of you.

In fact, this was one of the questions asked to me during an interview with a reputed production house a couple of years ago. They wanted to assess my knowledge of the company and their brands. The follow up question to such questions, in undoubtedly and generally quite simple: what laws do you think govern this industry?

Therefore, if you’re ever sitting for an interview for an in-house role, go thoroughly prepared. Don’t just know the brands, know the history of the company, whether it’s public or private, the latest news pertaining to that company or the industry in general and of course, the latest development in any law that possibly governs or affects that industry.

Trust me, if you know the industry and possibly show the knowledge in the interview right, you’ve probably won half the battle. The only question is how do you gain industry knowledge as an outsider. Will news articles suffice? No. You need to be a step ahead and know how the industry functions. For instance, a media house presently in the process of transitioning business focus from cable networks to digital platforms would expect you to know of intermediary liabilities, software agreements, privacy policies and terms and conditions put up on such websites.

Yes, it sounds like a mammoth of a task, however, if you google for help, you’d find courses on media and entertainment laws, cyber law courses that can help you work your way through it.

 

• Understanding The Needs of The Company

 

If you were asked to analyse the Prevention of Sexual Harassment Act and break it down to your company’s employees, would you be able to do it?

I am presuming a lot of you would say yes. However, what’s important to realise here is that, as lawyers we tend to use complicated terms, explain the law, and expect the layman sitting opposite the table to understand the jargon. This is exactly what companies do not need.

They need lawyers who could break down the laws to a checklist of do’s and don’ts for the management as well as employees.

Think about it, what happens when marketing needs a certain ad to be reviewed? Let’s say you find certain portions of the ad prone to call for a case of misleading advertisement. Do you tell them what the law is? Or do you explain to them what can be done? Or how could they tweak the ad to not be misleading?

What about in the case of a negotiation? Do you let go off a profitable deal because your best alternative solution has been thrown out of the door? Or do you think of what is in the best interests of the company and return to the table later?

As part of the in-house legal team, it is essential to understand that the business you are providing legal advice to, basically your internal clients, are what brings this very company the revenues it requires not only to sustain, but also to be profitable. Your job isn’t to tell them what the law says, it’s to support the business, legally in order for them to perform.

Is this all that companies look at while hiring for their in house team?

No. But these are qualities that they look for in every candidate.

If I were to add a number 6 here, I would have said that in-house counsels need to understand how litigation works. But that is something I would say from the perspective of an outside counsel who has had first hand experience with a number of in-house lawyers with zero knowledge of litigation, or how it works. And clearly, it may not be a mandate for these companies whose lawyers I may have interacted with. However, I do believe it would be an added advantage to anyone applying for an in-house role. More on that next time.