It Turns Out Litigators Are Being Hired For Internal Investigations

This story about how GM is launching an internal investigation by hiring its defense lawyers to do the investigating isn’t that new, but it does remind one that if you go through the revolving door, in addition to raising your salary, you’re changing your practice from one involving courtrooms and complaints to one involving conference rooms and the occasional negotiation with a regulator.

In my view, one of the biggest changes in law firm practice over the past 25 years has been the growth of this sort of work at the largest of firms, which used to stay the heck away from criminal practice.  That in turn has been facilitated by the emergence of the internal investigation as something that regulators expect to see done, which means that the new work is actually profitable (those investigations involve a lot of billing, defending a criminal case generally does not).  And that in turn has made the revolving door revolve more quickly; it used to involve high-ranking political appointees only, now almost any long-serving, mid-level-at-least lawyer in an enforcement agency can prove useful for a law firm.