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When looking at in-house roles, I often seen "commercial counsel" and "corporate counsel" roles, sometimes at the same company. From what I gather, commercial counsel seems to be geared to support business teams by doing things like negotiating incoming and outgoing contracts and maybe supporting product teams as they're developing new projects, whereas corporate counsel handles matters for the company as a whole, like making government/regulatory filings, any M&A, maybe raising corporate debt, and managing board and governance support. Does that sound right to people who are in-house or in a position to know?

As context, I'm a mid-level M&A associate looking to move in-house, but I'm a little concerned that I may be missing some of the nuance here. I guess it could also be that these titles are really squishy and there's no consistency between companies, so this whole question is unanswerable. But to the degree that's not the case, is one of these typically thought of as more demanding/better paid/viewed more favorably by internal applicants, etc?

Appreciate any insight!

You’ve got it basically right, I think. Corporate Counsel I think is a somewhat squishier role (in some companies it seems like more of a seniority level than a role description), and commercial counsel don’t do much support of product teams beyond negotiating deals (that’s the job of product counsel). But overall the distinctions are the ones you articulated.

Generally, corporate counsel jobs are *much* more desirable than commercial counsel. They are both better paid and more demanding.

Elston Gunn wrote: ↑

Wed Oct 20, 2021 12:02 pm

You’ve got it basically right, I think. Corporate Counsel I think is a somewhat squishier role (in some companies it seems like more of a seniority level than a role description), and commercial counsel don’t do much support of product teams beyond negotiating deals (that’s the job of product counsel). But overall the distinctions are the ones you articulated.

Generally, corporate counsel jobs are *much* more desirable than commercial counsel. They are both better paid and more demanding.

That's right. Corporate counsel gives insight into and the ability the chime in about the stuff that's important to the very company itself (e.g. strategic acquisitions). I suspect it also keeps more career doors open, in that I could see it being much easier to from corporate to commerical than vice versa.

Any thoughts on the actual quality of work or how interesting commercial counsel work is? I'm looking for inhouse in some smaller markets, where the corporate counsel appears to act as 1/2 corporate counsel 1/2 commercial (doing contract reviews and markups as well as M&A or corp governance work)

Anonymous User wrote: ↑

Thu Oct 21, 2021 10:58 am

Any thoughts on the actual quality of work or how interesting commercial counsel work is? I'm looking for inhouse in some smaller markets, where the corporate counsel appears to act as 1/2 corporate counsel 1/2 commercial (doing contract reviews and markups as well as M&A or corp governance work)

I mean, what are you expecting commercial counsel work to be like? It's vendor contracts and the like, taking your company's form and making subtle tweaks for all the things your company needs to do in the ordinary course of business. It's rote, low-profile, and doesn't require much thought.

That said, it's not a red flag for a hybrid role, especially if the legal team's smaller. Doing both is fine. Just don't expect commercial counsel work to be particularly interesting.