Practice area
Outside General Counsel
Many companies reach a point where legal questions arrive weekly but not daily. That is an awkward size. Sending each question to a different specialist is slow and produces inconsistent answers; hiring a general counsel is premature. Outside general counsel is the arrangement that covers the gap.
The issues
What this work involves.
- A single point of contact
- One relationship that holds the context — what the company sells, what it has signed, who owns what, and which decisions are still open — so recurring questions do not require re-explanation.
- Contract flow
- Reviewing inbound customer and vendor paper, maintaining the company's own templates, and setting a playbook so routine agreements can be handled internally without escalating every time.
- Employment and people questions
- The steady flow of hiring, classification, policy and separation questions that arise as a team grows, answered consistently rather than case by case.
- Governance and records
- Keeping board and member consents, the cap table and corporate records current, so a financing or sale is not delayed by six months of missing paperwork.
- Coordinating specialists
- Bringing in specialist counsel for tax, immigration, intellectual property prosecution, regulatory or foreign-law questions, and managing that work rather than leaving the company to manage it.
When counsel helps
Points at which a business usually needs advice.
- 01
Legal questions are being answered by whoever has time, usually a founder or an operations lead.
- 02
Contract review has become a bottleneck in the sales cycle.
- 03
The company uses several firms and no one holds the full picture.
- 04
Headcount is growing and employment questions are arriving faster than they are being resolved.
- 05
A financing or sale is on the horizon and corporate records need to be in order.
- 06
The company is not ready for an internal legal hire but is past the point of having none.
Our approach
How we handle the work.
We scope the engagement to what the company actually needs — a set monthly allocation, a defined list of covered matters, or availability for specific recurring work — and we revisit it as the company changes.
We aim to make ourselves less necessary for routine work. Templates, playbooks and short written guidance let a team handle standard agreements without a call, which is a better outcome than being consulted on everything.
We keep clear boundaries around what is inside the arrangement and what is not, so litigation, transactions and specialist matters are scoped and priced separately rather than absorbed quietly.
We tell the company when it has outgrown the arrangement. At a certain size an internal hire is the right answer, and an outside firm that never says so is not serving the client.
Relevant services
- Ongoing counsel under a defined monthly scope
- Inbound contract review and negotiation
- Contract templates and internal negotiation playbooks
- Employment and people-operations questions
- Policy and handbook maintenance
- Board and member governance support
- Corporate records and cap table upkeep
- Vendor and procurement terms review
- Diligence readiness ahead of a financing or sale
- Coordination and oversight of specialist counsel
- Legal risk review at planned intervals
- Support for an eventual in-house transition
Practical next steps
What to do before you speak to anyone.
- 01
Count the questions
Track legal questions for a month — what came up, who answered it, and how long it took. That record usually makes the right arrangement obvious.
- 02
Separate recurring from occasional
Recurring work suits an ongoing scope. Occasional, large matters are better handled as separate engagements, and mixing the two makes both harder to price.
- 03
Start with a defined scope
Begin with a written scope and a review date rather than an open-ended retainer, and adjust once there is evidence of what the company actually uses.
Other practice areas
Next step
Start with the situation, not the category.
Describe what is happening in a few lines. We will tell you whether it falls into this area, what handling it would involve, and how it would be scoped and priced.
We typically respond within one business day.