Insurance defense or state attorney general? Forum

[johnnyboy21]

I have been working at an insurance defense firm as a clerk since May. I generally get treated terribly by one partner in particular and they have been dangling an offer in front of me for months, but have not given me one. Their workload is like drinking from a firehose but I get a lot of experience.

I have an offer from the state Attorney General's office. The interview was kind of awkward because I'm a minority and this is a red state. But generally, everyone was very nice and complimentary.

Financially, there is about a $30,000 difference annually in the base salaries. Both places have decent benefits, with the state being slightly better. The firm has almost total flexibility in where you work and when you work, the AG has a hybrid office model and expects 9 to 5 Monday to Friday.

All else being equal, which position would you take and which has better exit options?

[Anonymous User]

There are very few instances where I would take an insurance defense job, if you're talking about car crashes and worker's compensation type work, over the AG position. (Insurance defense is fairly broad, given that most liability at a company is backstopped by some form of insurance.) For example, if you want to open a personal injury firm, the insurance defense job is more suited to your future goals.

[Anonymous User]

This is a no brainer. I'm a minority who worked at a state AG run by conservative Republicans for many years. I've also worked in insurance defense.

In most states, the clowns in the political wing of an AG office are irrelevant to most of the work that is done by real lawyers and mid-level supervisors. They are politicians doing typical politician bullshit, and they're both too busy and too incompetent to know what real litigators or various other practice specialists at the office are doing. AG work is extremely specialized niche work, depending on what division you join. AGs do file politically controversial litigation of course. By and large, this is done through partisan hacks that an AG will bring along with him or her who work on their floor, separate and apart from the rest of the office. Again, you are unlikely to be affected by what they do or don't do. All of this, of course, is subject to how small your state is and the unique characteristics of your state's AG office. The Texas AG is a truly huge law firm. Rhode Island, not so much.

My career at this office flourished. I was treated extremely well, in part because I was very good at my job (for which much credit goes to multiple mentors and good friends I was surrounded with, as well as an insatiable desire to constantly learn). As time went on the importance and high profile nature of the cases the office sent to me steadily increased, and I worked on cases as lead counsel that lawyers my age in law firms normally barely get to touch. You know what conservatives love more than anything? When a brown or black face is representing them in a tough case. I actually declined opportunities that came out of that shady dynamic because I was not interested in getting involved in politics. But it is a reality. If I was a Republican, I'd probably be a supreme court justice by now, ha ha. But no thanks.

The pay was pretty good over time, but it's a given that AG salaries at the junior level suck. If you do not have crushing law school debt that are forcing you to accept a higher salary, just buckle down and go the AG route. Insurance defense? Compared to biglaw it is a superior route to becoming a real litigator, for reasons you are now becoming familiar with: you get thrown into the deep end and are expected to swim to the surface on your own, or drown. That's a pretty good way of learning, as horrifying as it sounds. But the hours are horrendous, and just like biglaw there is no future in this for you if you are not a psychopath or sociopath willing to sacrifice your family for the sake of billable hours and the partners and clients you must constantly serve. You will probably burn out soon. Then, you will have to scramble to somehow squeeze into a cool government job that has 200 applicants for every 1 opening, when you could have gotten into the door from the very start?

If you stick to a career in government, your long-term financial and career success prospects are still excellent. You have to follow the rules, obviously: Be good to people around you; be a good lawyer; and refuse to be unethical for any reason, ever. If those are your core values anyway, you will feel right at home in government practice. Good luck.

[lavarman84]

This is a no brainer. I'm a minority who worked at a state AG run by conservative Republicans for many years. I've also worked in insurance defense.

In most states, the clowns in the political wing of an AG office are irrelevant to most of the work that is done by real lawyers and mid-level supervisors. They are politicians doing typical politician bullshit, and they're both too busy and too incompetent to know what real litigators or various other practice specialists at the office are doing. AG work is extremely specialized niche work, depending on what division you join. AGs do file politically controversial litigation of course. By and large, this is done through partisan hacks that an AG will bring along with him or her who work on their floor, separate and apart from the rest of the office. Again, you are unlikely to be affected by what they do or don't do. All of this, of course, is subject to how small your state is and the unique characteristics of your state's AG office. The Texas AG is a truly huge law firm. Rhode Island, not so much.

My career at this office flourished. I was treated extremely well, in part because I was very good at my job (for which much credit goes to multiple mentors and good friends I was surrounded with, as well as an insatiable desire to constantly learn). As time went on the importance and high profile nature of the cases the office sent to me steadily increased, and I worked on cases as lead counsel that lawyers my age in law firms normally barely get to touch. You know what conservatives love more than anything? When a brown or black face is representing them in a tough case. I actually declined opportunities that came out of that shady dynamic because I was not interested in getting involved in politics. But it is a reality. If I was a Republican, I'd probably be a supreme court justice by now, ha ha. But no thanks.

The pay was pretty good over time, but it's a given that AG salaries at the junior level suck. If you do not have crushing law school debt that are forcing you to accept a higher salary, just buckle down and go the AG route. Insurance defense? Compared to biglaw it is a superior route to becoming a real litigator, for reasons you are now becoming familiar with: you get thrown into the deep end and are expected to swim to the surface on your own, or drown. That's a pretty good way of learning, as horrifying as it sounds. But the hours are horrendous, and just like biglaw there is no future in this for you if you are not a psychopath or sociopath willing to sacrifice your family for the sake of billable hours and the partners and clients you must constantly serve. You will probably burn out soon. Then, you will have to scramble to somehow squeeze into a cool government job that has 200 applicants for every 1 opening, when you could have gotten into the door from the very start?

If you stick to a career in government, your long-term financial and career success prospects are still excellent. You have to follow the rules, obviously: Be good to people around you; be a good lawyer; and refuse to be unethical for any reason, ever. If those are your core values anyway, you will feel right at home in government practice. Good luck.

As (formerly) one of those partisan hacks, I feel attacked. But this is generally sound advice. The two things I need to know, OP, what are your career aspirations, and what unit/group is the offer from in the AG's office?

[Anonymous User]

Depending on the ID job, you could transition that to an in-house role with an insurance company. The role could be on the claims or legal side. You could also eventually transition to the business side (underwriting). I am not sure of the exit opps for the state job - I am sure others can chime in.

Good luck.

[Anonymous User]

Depending on the ID job, you could transition that to an in-house role with an insurance company. The role could be on the claims or legal side. You could also eventually transition to the business side (underwriting). I am not sure of the exit opps for the state job - I am sure others can chime in.

Good luck.

Transitioning to inhouse with an insurer is tenuous, and not lucrative. Insurers do like to hire former insurance defense litigators, but most of the jobs are as captive counsel, and that can be a complete sweatshop-like environment for not very good pay. The traditional inhouse counsel role that most lawyers envision is extremely difficult to land, within the insurance industry, and you are not going to get it with the insurance defense route. Those jobs are reserved for biglaw refugees who know transactional stuff, securities law, etc. Many "inhouse" jobs in insurance companies are actually just glorified claims adjuster jobs.

Exit opps for state AG lawyers tend to be very good, if you stick with them for long enough (which can be a challenge due to low salary). Both DOJ and biglaw poach from state AG offices all the time, depending on the division of course. It's possible to get assigned to handle very sophisticated, high profile and high level civil litigation as a state AG lawyer. But there are also many niches within state AG work that are looked down on and have high turnover, where the work is not sophisticated.

[Anonymous User]

Lucrative is relative here because some of you guys at funds, tech, energy, etc. make big money in-house. You can make decent money in-house in insurance but its more akin to salaries in other industries.

You can go in-house to the legal side from ID. It isn't just reserved for Big Law. This could be coverage work, compliance, transactional, etc. This is really dependent on what you're doing in ID, however. If you're doing slip and falls, car accidents, etc. this probably isn't an option. If you're doing EPL, coverage, D&O, professional liability, etc. it can be done.

Claims you could handle different lines - PL, E&O, D&O, and work your way up the corporate ladder. Claims jobs also pay more than they used to. After a few years you could easily be making over $200k. Again, not "lucrative" like some of the other guys but its steady work and decent money. You could also transition from claims to a broker and make decent money.

If you transition to the business/underwriting side you can make big money.

I agree with the statement about captives.. avoid those like the plague.

I can't comment on the exit opps for State AG but depending on your firm/school insurance has a lot of opportunities.

Having typed all this - if you the ID you are referring to is car accidents/slip & falls... the State AG job probably has better opportunities based on other people's comments.

[Anonymous User]

I'm a coverage litigator who has worked inhouse in the insurance industry. Don't truly disagree with the comments posted above but just a few nitpicks or additional points to make.

For one thing, insurance coverage is different from insurance defense. It's a notch better pay and considered more sophisticated work. That's not a knock on ID. Some of the best civil trial lawyers in the country are actually ID lawyers, or had ID backgrounds as they became skilled trial lawyers. But consequently, you're now competing with a bunch of other ID lawyers to break into it, which isn't easy, and you might not succeed.

I would definitely not assume that if you start out doing ID work, you're going to get your chance at coverage work. One of the benefits but curses of ID work is that there is a billion hours of work to be done at any given time. When you start in ID, you're going to keep getting ID cases shoved your way, potentially forever. There are plenty of moderately wealthy law firm partners who spend their entire lives handling ID cases. They will not be interested when you approach them to ask about handling coverage work.

If you do make it into coverage, well, I guess it wasn't that hard for me to land my inhouse position after building my reputation in coverage for a while. I would still caution that even with a coverage background, insurance companies will be more than happy to shove you into a captive counsel or claims handling position. That didn't happen with me, and I had a pretty fun job managing coverage litigation across the country. However, I was able to gain zero traction in trying to land a traditional general counsel position at the company. The general counsel's office there was staffed with lawyers with traditional general counsel qualifying credentials. They didn't seem to take either ID or coverage lawyers very seriously. And that's not totally illogical either: at the GC level you need some transactional chops, securities law, etc.