Lawyers inside have much less staff support than do lawyers in private firms

Andy Hull, a senior legal director for M&A at Yahoo! Inc., wrote a piece for the ACC Docket, Vol. 25, Dec. 2007 at 18, about the transition of lawyers from a law firm to a law department. “A big adjustment to moving in-house is the comparative level of administrative, back-end support.” Because a cost center is rarely funded as well as a revenue generator, “resources are typically more limited in-house.”

Secretarial pools, messengers, repro and telecommunications centers outsourced to experts, concierge services, overtime word processors, 24X7 paralegals, quiet book-lined libraries, these amenities are all things of the past for the lawyer who ventures inside. On the good side, however, there may be less call for that kind of administrative support because outside counsel are doing the things that demand it.