A Day in the Life of an In-House Counsel

• Author: Priya Harjani
• Pages: 52-55

Published in Litigation, Volume 48, Number 2, Winter 2022. © 2022 by the American Bar Association. Reproduced with permission. All rights reserved. This information or any portion thereof may not

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A Day in the Life of an

In-House Counsel

PRIYA HARJANI

The author is associate vice president and deputy general counsel at Northwestern University.

When I was outside counsel at a large law firm in Chicago, I

often wondered what in-house lawyers do all day. Given that

we as outside counsel were handling all of their major pieces of

litigation, how much else was there for the litigation-focused

in-house lawyers to do? When I began an in-house role in 2004,

I realized that was a very naïve thought. I was shocked and sur-

prised at the volume, variety, and challenge of the work. The

intensity and pace were something that I had not experienced

in my law firm practice.

Every in-house position is different, and I can only speak to

my experience at a large, private research university, but I expect

there are many similarities across most in-house roles. There are

some obvious aspects of being an in-house: not billing time, be-

coming more of a generalist, having one client, and dealing with

business as well as legal issues. However, to truly understand the

day-to-day of in-house counsel, one needs to experience it. Here

is a glimpse of the in-house world.

The Components of the Job

No two days in-house are ever the same. Every day I get to work

and make a list of what I need to complete that day. I look at my

master to-do list and create a daily list that has three sections:

(1) what I must complete that day, (2) what I should complete

that day, and (3) what I would like do if time permits. I never get

to section 3. I rarely get to section 2. Some days, it is a stretch to

even do section 1.

In-house counsel are always juggling numerous tasks and proj-

ects. I would estimate that I deal with an average of 10–15 unique

legal issues in any given day, and they vary greatly. At a univer-

sity, they can include advising about a tricky student disciplin-

ary issue, a sexual assault on campus, a faculty member accused

of research misconduct, allegations of a violation of National

Collegiate Athletic Association rules against a coach, a medical

student being accused of medical malpractice, an employee bully-

ing another employee, a subpoena for an employment file, a data

breach of sensitive information, a zoning request made to the lo-

cal municipality to build a new facility, an agreement to partner

with an international institution for a study abroad program, a

grand jury subpoena for records regarding a researcher who has

ties to China, a question about interpreting various regulations

pertaining to higher education, and the list goes on and on. This

is in addition to litigation and transactional matters for which

we hire outside counsel.

Who is calling with all these questions? While it is true that

in-house lawyers have only one client, which is the entity, that

one client is made up of numerous stakeholders. For me, those

stakeholders include the board of trustees, the president, the