Hedge Fund Lawyers

in terms of getting the job your best bet would be starting with restructuring at biglaw out of school 

There's a distinction between in-house counsel and transactional counsel at a lot of funds. In-house counsel is generally limited to compliance and fund formation work. I have never seen anyone hired directly out of law school for those kinds of roles, usually they hire people who have worked in a fund formation practice at a biglaw firm for several years. I think you should consider whether that is what you really want to do. Transactional roles are usually reserved for people who have experience in a particular area - finance, restructuring, M&A, etc. Those roles are fewer and further between, so it takes a lot of luck to find them. I have seen a handful of funds hiring lawyers directly out of law school for more esoteric transactional practices. But honestly I'd advise against it if that is the way you want to go - if you really want to be a lawyer, then work at a firm for a few years and then make the leap. 

Our compliance director is the most miserable SoB. One of our PMs used to bully him around the office. We would have felt bad for him if he wasn't the most power-hungry little tyrant to ever scream at a junior analyst for accidentally accepting a gift from a broker without his permission.

Do you want to be him?

Hedge funds are very varied organizations in terms of what responsibilities people have. I think the job usually isn't that interesting depending on the fund but the hours are probably lowkey and you're getting payed pretty well. My dad did some really minor legal work once for the GC of a hedge fund decades ago. That GC (and also at the time a Managing Partner and the CAO) directly negotiated the partial sale of the fund to JP Morgan for $1.4 billion in the mid 2000s. He also started and sold a legal consulting firm to Duff & Phelps. He did start out briefly at a big law firm in the derivatives group. I think that's probably one of the coolest careers you can have as a corporate attorney so it's not like being in-house at a hedge fund is necessarily a dead end. Depending on the fund, you can build a lot of responsibilities for all sorts of key stuff because the department divisions can be a lot less structured.

Edit: to add on to your questions, working at big law firm is usually miserable and it's super hard to become partner so that's why people go inhouse. In house hours are almost always way less and the pay decent (like 300k) whether you're at a corporate or a solid hedge fund. You can probably intern at a hedge fund as a 1L but you want to be a Summer Associate at a big law firm the next summers because you get paid really well and get credibility (that's probably the only way to get a legitimate inhouse counsel role at a fund right out of law school). Where you really want to intern as a 1L is the SEC if you want to go in house at a hedge fund in your career. SEC graduate program is a good path to becoming inhouse at a hedge fund too if you don't mind getting paid way way less than stomaching 2 years at a big law firm.

You may have luck at a startup firm, but it's more of an end-game role. 

Thought I should comment as an ex-restructuring lawyer, now business side at a distressed fund. It does happen on the distressed / credit side given there is value add in knowing process / docs / deal dynamics.

In terms of working as an actual lawyer in a fund, there is an enormous difference between being transaction counsel and more strictly “in-house”. The former is basically a managerial version of your usual M&A / restructuring lawyer - the latter is very different and it’s really all fund formation and compliance.

Echo the importance noted above of distinguishing between (1) compliance & fund formation versus (2) transactional counsel versus (3) the even-rarer business-side seat (disclosure - this is what I'm currently chasing as a former restructuring attorney). I've seen a decent amount of the second and third buckets in my own networking, and my law school roommate recently finished a ~5 year stint in a compliance/fund formation/etc role at a hedge fund. Caveat, gap in my knowledge is what the legal department at a truly massive manager like BlackRock looks like.

Big gating issue, these seats are rare. The friend referenced above was at a single-digit billions AUM fund where it was the GC, and then my friend replaced a low-level non-attorney compliance person with the carrot that 'you'll start out doing more compliance grunt-work but we'll transition you to more interesting truly legal fare over time / once the compliance program is beefed up' (a promise that was borne out, but tangent, hiring a true compliance-only person as a 3^rd team member became a multi-year fight that my friend never won). So, a grand total of two people. Smaller / less documentation-intense funds may only have a GC or outsource completely to outside counsel at a firm. And, as the public company GC I interned with during law school used to put it, a GC is essentially a quarterback... you're doing some work/learning things on the fly yourself (such as big ticket one-offs, like a regulator audit, some big litigation, M&A as an example from the corporate in-house context), but you’re really spending a lot of time just issue-spotting things that need to be done and then coordinating with outside counsel to actually do them for you. That means you need to know your stuff cold (to comprehensively issue-spot), so if you're contemplating jumping from a firm to a fund earlier in your career, you can't move as GC, which leaves you dependent on finding places that have legit ‘second seats’ or larger departments. So, I think the big takeaway is that if you're trying to make the move early on, you should probably focus on filtering funds/managers by scale.

Now, how do you get there? My friend is the only person I know who didn't start in biglaw and then move to a fund (he did SEC compliance work for a consulting firm straight out of law school for ~ 2 years before getting a lucky look from a recruiter). Getting to these seats principally comes down to preexisting client relationships and/or luck. The prototypical route for a junior move seems to be, start with a minimum of 2-3 years in biglaw (the better your firm name, the sooner you'll get looks) and then either move to a client or have your firm name stand out on a resume screen.     

A big gap I can’t speak to is whether you can make that move in-house as a junior and then climb up the ladder at the same fund to make GC. My friend left the fund he was at to go to a law firm with a strong fund formation practice because he wanted to be able to learn how to navigate the full spectrum of fund types / clients and flesh out his experience in a way that could set him up to potentially move back to a fund in the future as a GC, which is something he felt he wouldn’t be able to accomplish at the fund despite a good working relationship / apprenticeship mentality with the GC just because his view was limited to the fund’s perspective (whereas at a firm of course you have multiple clients whose perspectives you can use to inform/build your own knowledge). My limited anecdotal experience is that GCs typically have a longer tenure at a law firm before moving to a fund, and that among funds with small legal departments, there are specific law firms that have great alumni networks (Schulte comes to mind, but I’m sure there are some other examples of firms with practices that cater strongly to funds in some capacity where this comment is applicable).

Finally, your question about whether the pay is similar to in-house corporate exit opportunities… my hunch is that the pay for an attorney on the legal side at a fund can't be any worse that in-house corporate roles if that’s what you’re using as a comparison, but depending on the culture of the fund / whether you're looked at purely as a cost center or more favorably, you might be exposed to more bonus upside optionality (the latter was my roommate's experience, but caveat, the fund he was at did superlatively well during certain periods when he was there).

Wanted to give an update on how my job prospects turned out as a first-year student. Networked with quite a few PE Lawyer and Hedge Fund Lawyers. There's an abundance of compliance jobs if you network. Law jobs.... not so much. I did get an offer at a quant fund though as a summer law student but ended up taking a mega fund offer.