Fractional general counsel is ongoing legal support for your business from an external lawyer, instead of a full-time hire. Think of it as having a GC who already understands your product, data flows, sales motion, and risk tolerance—but who works with you on a structured, predictable basis rather than as a one-off issue spotter or memo writer.

For one-off, clearly bounded projects, hourly or flat-fee work can make sense. Fractional GC support is different: predictable monthly plans built around committed time, communication access, and specific types of work—so you can budget without surprise invoices. Advisory is $6,000 a month. Embedded is $11,000 a month for 3 to 5 hours a week, or $22,000 for 7 to 10. What varies between them is how closely we sit with your team: whether we are in your Slack, in your standing product and go-to-market meetings, and available same-day. The rate is identical at both Embedded levels and does not fall as the commitment grows. Interim GC coverage is available to existing and past clients on request, and net-new document drafting is quoted separately as a fixed fee.

Advisory and Embedded both run on a three-month initial term. Interim GC coverage runs on a rolling basis and converts to Advisory or Embedded when you make your permanent hire, with that conversion written into the engagement letter at signing rather than negotiated later.

Both, but they are priced differently. Your monthly plan covers review, negotiation, and judgment: the inbound MSA, the vendor DPA, the product question before you ship. Net-new documents are projects with defined deliverables, so a privacy policy, terms of use, a DPA, a BAA, or a subscription services agreement written from scratch is quoted as a fixed fee outside the plan. Each fixed fee includes an intake call, one revision round, and a walkthrough with your team. Pricing it this way keeps your monthly time available for the work that actually needs a general counsel.

You should, eventually. A fractional engagement is right when the work is real but not yet a full-time job, or when the experience you need is narrower than the person you can realistically hire. Companies often hire for pedigree and end up with an excellent corporate lawyer who has never designed a consent architecture or negotiated an AI vendor agreement. We are frequently the lawyer with the privacy and AI experience working alongside that person, reporting to them.

Fractional GC and outside general counsel describe the same relationship: an external lawyer who functions as your general counsel on an ongoing, embedded basis rather than a full-time hire. "Outside general counsel" (OGC) emphasizes the role; "fractional" emphasizes that you get a portion of a GC's time on a predictable plan.

Traditional outside counsel is a different arrangement. Advisory counsel will often flag legal risk, cite the law, and hand you a list of things to do. In our fractional GC work, we stay closer to the execution. If a project needs input from product, engineering, marketing, and security—an AI audit, say, or a new data-sharing workflow—we help run point instead of just handing you an instruction manual. We still give the legal analysis; we also help you get the thing done. We walk through the model in depth in our guide to outside general counsel services.

Yes. Many of our clients already have a GC or a lean in-house team. In those cases, we plug in as an extension of your legal function—focused on AI governance, privacy, and commercial work that is under-resourced or new to the team. We can take discrete projects off their plate, cover overflow during a busy quarter, or own a specific workstream (vendor AI reviews, privacy program updates) while staying aligned with their overall strategy.

Yes—it's a core focus. Post-product-market-fit SaaS teams cross revenue and data thresholds that trigger privacy and regulatory obligations, often before they are ready for a full-time legal hire, and they field constant customer security reviews and contracts. We embed as your fractional GC to handle exactly that—customer MSAs and DPAs, security-review responses, privacy, and AI-feature counseling—on a predictable monthly plan.

Often we manage them instead. Patent prosecution and regulatory defense outside our practice areas go to firms that handle that work, and we make sure their instructions are clear and their invoices match; several clients bring us in specifically to hold those relationships and keep the spend under control. Litigation and trademark prosecution we handle ourselves, under separate engagements priced for that work rather than inside a monthly plan.

General corporate, employment, and tax work. Those need lawyers who do them every day, and we will point you to ones we trust. We also turn down engagements where what the company needs is volume rather than judgment—high-throughput review of routine paper, or coverage of a queue while a legal team turns over. A managed legal services provider will do that faster and cheaper than we will.