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.

“Being in-house, the most important thing that we can do to be useful and to do our job effectively is to know the business. And an attorney who has worked in the industry and worked for a competitor before can be really useful in that respect,” said Rebecca Signer Roche, assistant general counsel of labor and employment at DynCorp International. But at the same time, she said, there are “a lot of ethical considerations” around attorney-client privilege and attorney work product.