She may not be an active tweeter, but Genelle Ng has done a lot already in her three months as legal counsel at Twitter Inc. Ng recently was interviewed by Lina Guo and Barbara Kott of Ms. JD about her new in-house role, including work on partnerships with Flipboard Inc. and Yahoo Japan Corp.
Some notable takeaways from the conversation include:
- How her Big Law career helped her in-house one: Ng says she learned a lot about basic licensing during her time at Fenwick & West, while making use of formal and informal resources at the firm, which included shadowing more senior lawyers. She also credits the large law firm workload with improving her time-management and multitasking abilities.
- The big leap: For Ng, the move in-house was more of a destination than a departure from her predetermined career path. “I knew I wanted to go in-house as early as my 2L year in law school,” she says. She spent the summer after her first year of law school at Sun Microsystems Inc. and felt a comfortable fit. A mentor advised her to join a firm first to get the training she’d need, and that’s what she did.
- What she wishes she could tell her Big Law self: “I wish I had known how extremely busy it actually is to work in-house,” says Ng. “In-house, there’s less of a need to work nights and weekends, but you are completely swamped during the times that you are working.”
