Building an in-house legal career in Canada does not happen by accident. It takes timing, fit, and a willingness to think past the legal answer. General counsel who built their own departments from scratch know exactly what they look for when they hire and promote. Here is what one of them says it actually takes.
What it takes to build an in-house legal career in Canada
For many lawyers, an in-house legal career starts with timing and opportunity. Allen Garson, General Counsel & Corporate Secretary of the Investment Management Corporation of Ontario (IMCO), spent decades in private practice, first at Heenan Blaikie LLP, then at Dentons Canada LLP as co-head of the national mergers and acquisitions practice.
IMCO grew out of the 2016 Morneau Report, which recommended consolidating Ontario’s public-sector investment management under one roof. It opened in July 2017, and Garson joined a month later as its first general counsel, tasked with building the legal function from scratch.
A few things made the shift appealing to him:
- public purpose, after a full career in private practice
- a startup environment, with two large founding members and global portfolios
- a mandate to build the department, rather than inherit one
Garson describes his approach through what he calls risk-adjusted advice. “Everything has risk. There’s no problem that doesn’t have risk and there’s no solution that doesn’t have risk. It’s about how you assess the risk, how you analyze it, how then you apply it to the circumstances and the objectives, how you weigh it against those, and then how you come out with a good set of judgment,” he says.
That framework, Garson says, is where an in-house legal career looks different from private practice: less the correct legal answer, more weighing that answer against what the organization is trying to do.
Here’s a video which discusses what general counsel looks for when hiring a junior lawyer in-house:
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How top general counsel manage and structure their legal teams
Garson keeps his team’s structure flat, giving people room to lean into decisions instead of waiting for direction. The team is built around one question: why are they there, and what is their role.
Legal, compliance, governance, and public affairs all sit together at IMCO, a structure Garson set up deliberately. He treats compliance as part of every process rather than a final checkpoint, and sees governance and public affairs as extensions of legal work, not separate lanes.
A few habits keep that structure working:
- regular debriefs on how the team framed advice, not just what the advice was
- checking whether the team surfaced the bigger picture, not just the legal issue
- shifting investment teams away from a simple yes or no, toward a partnership model
That last point, Garson says, is the real challenge. Investment teams often want a quick answer. Getting them to see the legal team as a partner, rather than a gatekeeper, takes repeated effort.
Choosing and working with external counsel in a changing market
For Garson, the value of an outside firm comes down to how far the lawyer will go past the analysis. The best outside counsel help him think through the organization’s risk appetite directly, not just list legal issues. This varies firm to firm, and partner to partner. Some are strong at it, while others are not.
He expects artificial intelligence to change what general counsel need from external firms rather than remove the need for them. As business and investment teams gain their own AI-generated summaries and scenarios, the value they need from outside counsel shifts toward:
- assessing what those scenarios actually mean
- flagging which risks are acceptable
- supporting transactional, regulatory, diligence, and negotiation work that still needs a lawyer’s judgment
Garson also expects billing models to shift as AI compresses the time needed for certain work. The work itself will not disappear, he says, but the expectations attached to it will keep rising.
Advancing your career: what gets in-house lawyers promoted
Garson’s hiring standards double as a signal of what growth looks like inside an in-house legal career. The traits he looks for in a new hire tend to be the same ones that separate lawyers who advance from those who plateau.
He points to five things in particular:
- a toolkit wide enough to handle problems outside a narrow specialty
- comfort with ambiguity, since in-house work rarely has clear boundaries
- strong people skills, since representing the team well matters as much as the analysis
- the ability to discuss risk in business terms, not just identify it
- a genuine willingness to grow into harder risk conversations, not stop at analysis
Garson notes that many private-practice lawyers are strong at spotting issues and producing analysis, but slower to judge whether a given risk is one the organization should take on. That gap, more than technical skill, often separates a lawyer who advances in-house from one who stalls.
The importance of being in-house, Garson adds, is most satisfying and most effective when a lawyer becomes a real business partner and not just a legal advisor. “That involves bringing lateral thinking, risk-adjusted advice, building trusted relationships, and knowing where to add real value.”
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