The general counsel seat, without the seat.
Legal already has an owner at your company. It's whoever happened to pick up the last contract. This engagement moves that weight onto someone whose actual job it is.
- 1
Contracts, employment questions, and diligence requests all land on the COO's desk, on top of the job the COO was actually hired to do.
- 2
Your deal firm is excellent at financings and priced accordingly. You need someone for Tuesday.
- 3
The board asked who owns legal, and the honest answer was a shrug.
Triage and judgment
You get a standing counsel who reads everything that arrives and tells you what matters this quarter, what can wait, and what can never wait. Routine questions come back the same day, so they never pile up into a backlog you're afraid to open.
The function, not just advice
Here's a typical month. Customer redlines come back on the timeline we committed to. An employment question gets settled before it turns into a dispute. Board materials get prepared. Something you didn't know to ask about gets flagged early, because somebody is reading everything. And the record gets kept as we go, so your file stays ready for diligence instead of turning into an archaeology project two years from now.
Counsel to the board
We sit in the meetings that matter, keep consents current, and give your directors a legal picture that's written down with a name attached to it. That includes the AI answer, for the meeting where someone asks who owns that.
The build-vs-buy arithmetic
A first full-time general counsel typically runs $330,000 to $470,000 fully loaded, and then there's a recruiter fee on top of that. You're making a fixed commitment before you know what your real legal volume looks like. An outside GC engagement runs a fraction of that number, scales with the volume you actually have, and ends with a handoff rather than a severance conversation. The math matters, but it's the second question. Fit is the first.
When the answer is a full-time GC
At some point the volume justifies the seat, commonly as ARR crosses into the $5M to $10M range. We'll tell you when we think you're there, help you run the search, and hand over a function that already works: playbooks, templates, records, and the context behind the decisions. We are built to be replaced, and that's the design.
Fifteen minutes. No pitch.
You talk, we diagnose. You leave with the two or three exposures worth addressing first, along with a straight answer on whether you need counsel now, including "not yet."