Based on all my interactions with people, Capital Markets is termed to be the most dirty, monotonous, hectic and mind numbing work. It was also said that capital markets lawyers are not recruited as in-house counsels either. Is this true? Can capital markets lawyers shift to other teams? It is fascinating to me, at what point does pe/vc work become the most interesting work and cap markets becomes monotonous. I mean both primarily deal with equity, don't they?

Even I am just a fresher working with a T1 Competition team, so I don't know much. But from what I know, competition law in-house positions are VERY far and few. For in-house roles, they usually look for generalists, someone who can look after the whole spectrum of legal issues the company has. Most companies don't have that much to do with antitrust as a matter of routine, for low-level work, generalist in-house counsels can manage (they are lawyers too, after all). For specialised work (audits, investigations and mergers), they will engage external counsel.

Very tough to do so relative to other practice areas. In the past 2-3 years, competition law and policy related roles have opened up in certain kinds of companies. However, these are few and far in between and not entry level roles. PQE of 7+ years at least, for a limited set of individuals who have made such a transition.

The job requires a lot of due diligence work because of which the work becomes monotonous. Atleast at A0~A1 level, there is no application of mind as most of the work involves mapping of agreements, licenses, guarantees etc with the DRHP. The work is easy but laborious. The pressure is a lot because of the strict deadlines.