There’s long been a revolving door between the federal government and big law firms. But now that the Obama administration is coming to a close, could his lawyers decamp for in-house legal departments?
It wouldn’t be uncharted territory. In the 1990s, a number of U.S. Department of Justice lawyers took jobs as general counsel, blazing a clear-cut trail from government to corporate America. And, in recent years, some of Obama’s lawyers have already gone in-house, including former associate attorney general Tony West, who became GC of PepsiCo Inc. in 2014, and Kimberley Harris, a former lawyer in the White House Counsel’s Office and now the GC of NBCUniversal Media LLC.
