In-house experience can be a valuable boost to a private practice career and in-house lawyers should consider the possibility of private practice,   says Jill Wong, special counsel to the dispute resolution practice at Mallesons’ Hong Kong office. Wong has just moved back to private practice after working as deputy general counsel at the Hong Kong Monetary Authority and, most recently, as  head of the Asia-Pacific Regulatory Advisory Group in the Legal and Compliance Department at Credit Suisse.

Wong said that her experience working at a financial institution has assisted in private practice because, as legal advisor to business clients who are grappling with increasingly demanding regulatory requirements, she is uniquely placed to understand their practical needs and concerns, having been inside the business herself. “With the increased complexity in regulations and onerous penalties facing institutions in today’s regulatory environment, corporations need to identify and manage risk and understand what the regulatory "hot spots" are. It is simply not enough nowadays to provide pure legal advice; it has to be supplemented with real practical experience and an appreciation of the commercial realities of the business of the client.  As a lawyer who has worked both with a regulator and in-house, and with experience both in contentious and non-contentious regulatory issues, I can assist clients to look around corners and pro-actively deal with the challenges of doing business where regulatory scrutiny is reaching unprecedented high levels ,” said Wong.

Mallesons partner Denis Brock says that the proportion of lawyers with both private practice and in-house experience has increased: “Certainly the days when you spend all your time as a lawyer in private practice or in-house are well and truly over,” he observed. Brock also observed that for some financial institutions,  there is a move  towards extracting the "embedded lawyers" from the business units and returning them to independent legal departments. “Many banks are taking the embedded lawyer out of the team, because as part of the business  team there may be pressures which affect the ability to perform an independent control function,” he said.