Can You Be Managed? And 4 Other Questions You Must Answer, Spot On
[00:00:00] I would like to transition from my solo practice focused on the handling commercial law and tech contracts for a business to an in-house commercial counsel. We're working on commercial and tech contracts for a tech company. Great. I have a law degree from a great top 50 law school and undergraduate degree in computer science from university of 15 nationally for computer science and prior professional experience at publicly traded IT company as a computer analyst and as an account executive selling it services and solutions. After a few rounds of interviews at a technology company, I was not selected for the role. The feedback received was that they had concerns about transitioning from my solo practice, to an in-house role. True. Okay. What types of concerns are there about an attorney coming from a solo practice, moving in-house and how I can allay those concerns, what other strategies are for moving in-house from solo practice.
All right. That's a good question. So for those of you that have been on these webinars before there's the questions any employers ask you in hiring you? And these are Harrison's rules.
So they're always asking, can you do the job? Then they're asking, do you want the job? Will you do the job long-term? Can you be [00:01:00] managed? Do we like you?
So all of these things, you really need to hit a home run, with answers to each of these questions in order to get hired. The first one is, can you do the job? I believe with you, the odds, it sounds yes.
You have the skills, you understand how to do the work, you've done everything. So I don't think the employers are going to have any issues with that. Do you want the job? Yes. They believe that you probably do want the job. I don't know why you want to go from in-house, you need to articulate that hard to get clients.
You need to basically have some sort of pitch for that, but I think you'll be able to answer that question. You can basically tell them that you why you want the job.
The next thing is where you do the job long-term and, they may have some questions there. The answers to that question may be, do they think you'll stick around. For that, they're going to look at your previous experience, the ability to get along with others, and will you stick around? I don't know the answer to that. I'm assuming that you did okay. Then the other one is, can you be managed? Can you be managed is a big one, and I talk about this in [00:02:00] every meeting. The problem is, you've been managing clients. You've been the manager, so you've had your own law firm. The same person up here that we just talked about with the older person. That's the other question too. Can you be managed?
And so I talked about how, this person, thirties or forties, maybe taking orders from people that are younger than them. So people need to be able to manage you. Management is a big deal. Being able to manage people and making sure that they thought that you follow instructions, that, you do things the way they want them done, you don't talk back, you don't know everything. All of that sort of stuff is very important. I don't know the answer to that question, my guess is that this is where you need to basically come across as someone that's manageable and there's certain people that are manageable and others that aren't.
So for example, if you were running a company, would you want to hire Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos to be your assistant or your operations person or something? You wouldn't. They would take over the room and they would know everything.
So you've been in a position where you've been in charge, where you've been advising companies where you know everything [00:03:00] and they want to be able to manage you. I have this problem with people that work for our company all the time, especially cause I hire a lot of attorneys, so they think they know how everything's done and they're difficult to manage.
So you need to basically come across to someone that you can be managed. And that means acting like someone that, wants to work for someone else and wants to take direction, wants to help them and doesn't know everything. When I was younger and my company, I used to interview older people all the time and they would walk in and say, you need this, you need to do this, I need to train you how to do this. And, I would be like, F you, I don't need, someone older telling me what to do in my company. Companies are thinking the same way. You may think, what's best for the company. All this stuff about contracts, you have all these qualifications, but the law firm or the employer needs to know you can be managed, and this is a big deal.
For everyone on this call, can you do the job just means, are you smart enough? Can you do the work? That's all they care about, but, do you want the job? We stick around. And can you be managed is always very important then do we like you is the final one.
So, do we like you? If people don't like you, this is a way for them to [00:04:00] basically not hire people that they don't like. And so they'll come up with other reasons. They'll say things like, not a good fit, went with someone else, went another direction or whatever, so you need to be likable.
Last week when I was talking in this webinar, we had somebody and the thing came up. Labor and management, so you have labor management. And so a lot of times people act like they're not on the side of management and the management won't like them, and then they don't get hired.
So you have to act like you're with your friends and likable and have people's back and all sorts of things. So if people think you're going to Sue them and if they think you're going to, make trouble or, make an issue out of, whatever, they're not going to like you.
So, it's hard when people, come from, like top law schools and then they go into, preppy little firms, because people may hold their good qualifications against them. So you just have to be careful. But my big point for you is I think that, when you're coming out of a solo practitioner job, that the law firms are going to be concerned about, you may not be doing the job long-term because you already went and set up your own practice and you can do things on your own.
So [00:05:00] what's to keep you from doing that again. And then the other one is can you be managed? You've been doing things on around, so these are your obstacles. My big thing for you guys is everyone in this call, is that you need to make sure that you answer these questions and if all you did was study these questions before each interview, you would do well, but you need to understand where people are coming from.