In-House Opportunities for White-Collar / Investigations? Forum

[Anonymous User]

I'm a first-year associate who is considering doing more white-collar / investigations work. However, I don't have a good sense of what the in-house opportunities are for lawyers in this field. Obviously many people want to make the jump to government, but if one doesn't want to go that route, are there viable in-house roles?

[j01]

Yes, especially if you can build a history of privacy investigations.

[Anonymous User]

Yes, especially if you can build a history of privacy investigations.

How big a company do you need to be before you have actual privacy investigations counsel? I’ve seen postings for jobs like that at Facebook, but I work at a pretty damn big tech company and privacy investigations are just 10% of the job of the privacy counsel (none of whom have a white collar background). Maybe this is a bigger thing than I realize.

To the OP’s question, I would say it is a little bit more marketable for in house than general lit. Big banks for example all have a bunch of lawyers that are ex-Biglaw white collar associates that do internal investigations. Just keep in mind you’d be handling the stuff that’s not really important enough to hire outside counsel for, and a lot of it seems to be investigating HR complaints.

[j01]

Yes, especially if you can build a history of privacy investigations.

How big a company do you need to be before you have actual privacy investigations counsel? I’ve seen postings for jobs like that at Facebook, but I work at a pretty damn big tech company and privacy investigations are just 10% of the job of the privacy counsel (none of whom have a white collar background). Maybe this is a bigger thing than I realize.

To the OP’s question, I would say it is a little bit more marketable for in house than general lit. Big banks for example all have a bunch of lawyers that are ex-Biglaw white collar associates that do internal investigations. Just keep in mind you’d be handling the stuff that’s not really important enough to hire outside counsel for, and a lot of it seems to be investigating HR complaints.

I wasn't saying there are a lot of openings, but if you find a niche in privacy investigations, you can supplement the limited openings there otherwise are with, yes, Facebook etc. But that includes a lot of large tech companies that are regularly getting sued for privacy violations.

[Anonymous User]

In-house counsel chiming in. I did some white-collar investigations work at my previous non-FAANG employer (also in-house). Was a former litigator in BigLaw and when I moved in-house, I expressed an interest in investigations/white collar work. Did that along with more corporate generalist work.