For companies without a legal function
A legal function, before it is a salary.
Contracts get signed unreviewed. Policies exist because somebody downloaded a template. Nobody owns compliance, and outside counsel is instructed only once something has already gone wrong. We build the function and then run it, for a fixed monthly fee.
The pressure
A general counsel is a substantial salary plus benefits, recruitment and severance risk — and one person's expertise, who will still send specialist work outside and will still take annual leave. Below a certain scale that hire is difficult to put to a board.
Meanwhile the exposure does not wait for the org chart. The gap between the two is what this is for.
What we take on
-
Fractional general counsel
A qualified lawyer who owns the function, sits in the meetings that matter, and answers the phone when something lands.
-
Standard terms rebuild
Your customer and supplier terms rewritten for the business you actually run, rather than the one you ran when they were drafted.
-
Contract process and register
A signing process people follow, and a register of what has actually been committed to, with renewal dates surfaced in advance.
-
Compliance framework
Anti-bribery, conflicts, gifts and entertainment, whistleblowing and data protection — on a refresh schedule rather than after an incident.
-
Board packs, minutes and resolutions
Prepared on a meeting calendar agreed at the start of the year, in a form that will stand up if anyone reads it back later.
-
Delegations of authority
Approval limits and signing authority mapped to how decisions are really made, then written down and kept current.
-
Group structure and intra-group agreements
Structure charts, service and licence agreements between entities, powers of attorney, and the annual housekeeping nobody has time for.
-
External counsel selection and management
We instruct, scope before work starts, and check the bill. In year one this is usually where most of the saving comes from, not from our fee.
-
Risk register and board reporting
Legal and regulatory exposures written down, ranked, owned and dated — one page a month, in language your board already uses.
-
Regulatory correspondence
Responses to regulators and authorities drafted and coordinated, with licensed local counsel instructed where the law requires it.
The first ninety days
An audit, then a function.
We read your contracts, your policies and your last year of legal invoices, and hand you a written picture of what you are exposed to. That document is yours whether or not you go further.
From there: templates, registers, policies and the filing calendar built and populated over the following weeks. By the end of the quarter there is a legal function where there was not one — and a one-page monthly report showing what it is doing.
Where a matter calls for a licensed practitioner in your jurisdiction, we select and instruct them, scope the work before it starts, and check the bill. You deal with us; we deal with them.
Next
Begin with the audit.
A conversation first. If a full-time hire is the better answer for you at your scale, we will say so then rather than in month four.
Make an enquiry