Bruce Sewell, former Apple senior vice president and general counsel/photo by Diego M. Radzinschi/The National Law Journal

Bruce Sewell, the former general counsel of Apple Inc. and Intel Inc., shared lessons from his three decades of legal industry experience with early career lawyers in a Sunday interview published by YouTube channel Before You Take the LSAT.

In the nearly hourlong interview with channel founder and Columbia Law School student Doreen Benyamin, Sewell gave law students a glimpse of life in-house at large corporations, answering questions and offering advice on what it takes to cut it as a general counsel. Here are five takeaways:

1. When a crisis hits, stay calm. In times of crisis, Sewell said time seems shorter and every decision comes under pressure. General counsel should be able to keep a clear head and, even with heightened stakes, lead their team and company with rational, well thought-out decisions. “That combination of a lot of stress and noise and compressed time frame … make for bad decision-making,” he said. “And if you can find a way to step back from that, keep your head, be levelheaded [it helps].”

2. Litigator vs. transactional lawyers. Sewell began his legal career as a litigator, but he took a transactional lawyer gig for his first in-house role at Intel. There are benefits to entering a legal team as either type of lawyer, he said. For litigators, it is “easier to move around within the corporate environment” because of the foundational skills in conflict resolution and risk spotting developed in the role. He said transactional lawyers are more likely to ”have opportunities to step over into the business space that don't exist for other people in the legal department, but you probably won't have a lot of opportunities to move around within the legal department.”

3. Don't rush in-house. Companies usually look to hire attorneys who have spent between three to five years at a firm, Sewell said, when they've “learned the basic … skills of whatever practice area you've decided to pursue, but you're still young enough in your career that you can learn how to do it the Intel way or learn how to do it the Apple way.” The second “sweet spot” is after around 10 years at a firm. He said in-house lawyers need to be “the legal expert” and usually cannot get the professional training firms provide at companies.

4. Learn how to lead large groups and manage small ones. At Apple, Sewell was responsible for a legal department of around 900 people, though he only directly managed 10 employees. “My role primarily was to … provide some sort of strategic compass to the group and then be an immediate mentor and supervisor to the 10 people who worked directly for me,” he said. “And then they would carry that message and they would hopefully role model the same characteristics that I wanted the department to exhibit.”

5. Business sense, not just legal, is crucial in-house. That means sometimes embracing risks and using them to the company's advantage, rather than staying in safety mode. Businesspeople, he said, unlike lawyers, are trained to manage risk versus eliminate it, and company lawyers should be able to do the same. General counsel should ”be sympathetic to and respond to that [business risk] approach of, 'I'm not trying to eradicate risk … I'm trying to use risk as my friend,'” he said.