Fractional General Counsel

Most companies reach a point where legal questions arrive faster than outside counsel can economically answer them, and well before the volume justifies a full-time hire. What gets lost in that gap is not document drafting. It is judgment: someone who knows the company, has seen the situation before, and can tell you in one conversation whether something is routine or whether it needs real attention.

Most of that judgment is triage. A general counsel who tries to be every specialist is expensive and slow; one who reaches for a specialist on every question is not adding anything. The work is knowing which questions are answerable now, which need a specialist, which specialist, and what they need to be told to be useful.

Companies accumulate legal obligations the way they accumulate everything else, gradually and then all at once. The work is unglamorous and it compounds: minutes that were never signed, a stock ledger that drifted from the documents, contracts renewed on terms nobody re-read.

None of it is urgent until it is, particularly in diligence, when all of it is urgent at once. A buyer or an investor reads a clean corporate record as a signal about how the company is run, and a messy one the same way.

Not every company that needs this is without an internal lawyer. A solo general counsel carries the entire legal function, including the parts that arrive all at once: a financing, a diligence request, an acquisition, a board that suddenly wants more. Some find that large-firm cost structures do not support full delegation, or that they simply do not have the bandwidth to oversee outside counsel as closely as the work requires.

We work alongside in-house counsel as an additional experienced set of hands, including coordinating outside specialists and giving them the context and direction that keeps the work on track.

Companies with real customers, employees, and contracts, and without a legal function of their own. Often after a first priced round, when investors have added governance obligations and the board expects things to be handled. Sometimes before, when a founder has learned what it costs to guess.

Dustin has served as Chief Legal Officer of a startup drug development company, as fractional outside general counsel for startups, as co-counsel alongside large-firm attorneys and an additional set of hands for the solo in-house general counsel, and as sole corporate counsel for a public company. These vantage points inform how we deliver legal services.

Engagements are scoped to the company and the moment, from occasional questions through ongoing support.