Beyond advising on a wide range of legal issues, in-house counsel are often valuable because of the intimate knowledge they have of the companies for which they work. But does this very same depth of insight create a risk for companies looking to hire in-house counsel from a competitor?
There are certainly potential issues a company may encounter when looking to hire in-house attorneys from a rival, including that an attorney is taking privileged information or that a conflict is imputed to all in-house lawyers in a legal department, according to both in-house and outside counsel, but there are ways to minimize the risk.
