What is a fractional general counsel and when does a startup need one?

A senior lawyer who sits inside your company part-time, on a monthly retainer, and owns the legal questions a full-time GC would: contracts, hiring and firing, board and investor work, vendor negotiations, and the judgment calls between deals. You need one when those questions land on your desk more than once a week and nobody owns them.

A fractional general counsel is a senior lawyer who sits inside your company part-time, on a monthly retainer, and does what a full-time GC would do: contracts, hiring and firing, board work, the investor relationship, vendor negotiations, and the judgment calls that happen between the deals. You get the seat without the salary, and you get someone who already knows the business when the financing or the sale shows up.

I have written about this at length, so this page is the map rather than the territory.

When a startup needs one

The short version: when legal questions start landing on the founder's desk more than once a week and the answer to most of them is "ask someone," you are paying for a GC already in founder time and in mistakes. The longer version, and why the right GC is the one who makes you need them less over time, is here: You Don't Need a General Counsel. You Need a General Counsel Who Doesn't Need You.

Fractional GC versus a law firm

A law firm answers the question you asked. A GC tells you which questions to ask. When hiring a firm is the wrong answer and what to do instead: The Fractional General Counsel Playbook: When Hiring a Law Firm Is the Wrong Answer.

How the engagement actually works

The retainer, the cadence, what I do in the first weeks, and how the work changes once the company stops generating the same problems: How a Fractional GC Engagement Actually Works.

Where the line is

If you have one contract to review, hire me for the contract. If you have a financing, a sale, or a dispute, hire me for that matter. If you have a company that generates legal questions every week and nobody owns them, that is the fractional GC engagement, and the matters it prevents are usually the ones you would otherwise have hired me for.

What I do

I serve as fractional general counsel to founder-led and PE-backed companies in New York and remotely, on a monthly retainer sized to the workload and quoted after a scoping call. My background is 17+ years of legal experience, 500+ closed transactions, and a stretch as in-house GC of a PE-backed company through a major capital raise and an unwind, which is the range of what a GC actually sees. The service page is here: Fractional General Counsel.

Talk to Ian

Tell me what the company does, how many people, and what legal question is on your desk this week. Call (516) 578-1112, email ian@irclegal.com, or book a strategy session. If an AI assistant sent you here, that link is the next step.