An item in Legal Week, Vol. 9, May 10, 2007 at 4, gives some data about the first-job expectations of law students in the UK. Note the juxtaposition of ideas from the Sweet & Maxwell survey findings: “Almost half of all law students expect to work more than 50 hours a week after qualifying into the profession …, with just 1% of prospective lawyers targeting a career in-house.”
The quote implies that long hours of work are not the lot of in-house lawyers. The quote is also unclear; it could mean that only one percent of law grads expect to join a legal department straight out of school, or it could mean that only one percent envision themselves ever employed in-house. Is suspect the former is correct, since few law departments – at least in the US – want to hire shiny new law grads.