Originally Posted by Unregistered

At a senior level, litigation is very person-focused, people are far more likely to follow the person to their new firm (or hire good litigators who set up their own small/mid-size firms). This makes sense, as litigation is more "let's find the best guy to fight the case". If you're a good litigator, you should have a consistent flow of work. Unlike corp, where the law firm's branding is more important, litigation depends on the person.

On the other hand, you won't have large firms using small firms to perform corporate work. This is for two reasons, 1. alot of corporate work is spread between all the biglaw firms just to make sure they are conflicted from (or refuse to) pursuing litigation against the firm, that's why banks essentially hire all the big4 and most international firms in SG. 2. Firms generally prefer to have biglaw corp firms to do their admin/corp work because they know that corporate work is generally quite stale/similar to prior work, so biglaw firms are seen as having more precedents to draw from. To be honest, there isn't much difference between the top corporate lawyers and the middling lawyers.

So honestly, unless you are from a brand name firm and worked for large corporate clients for many years, you're likely not to have people cold-calling you for your amazing corp skills. You have to draw on previously made connections.

However, it is not that corporate lawyers move inhouse because they cannot get clients or cannot cut it in smaller firms. In fact, corp work is usually easier to bill than litigation. Big firms who want an M&A agreement done "right" are far more willing to pay than disputing parties who suddenly start wondering why 30% of the disputed sum has already gone to fees.

Instead, it's just that its harder to move inhouse as a litigation lawyer, because your skillset is primarily disputes, which is not what companies do day to day. For a corp lawyer, you can do contract reviews etc for the firm or just give general corporate advice. For a liti lawyer, unless you're in maybe construction or industries like shipping (where litigation is essentially the bread and butter duty for the lawyer), you can't really move inhouse.