Of Counsel & Outsourced General Counsel
Ongoing legal counsel for technology companies that need a lawyer on call — without the overhead of a full-time in-house hire.
The Monthly Retainer Model
Most growing technology companies have steady legal needs but not enough to justify a full-time hire. The result is familiar: legal questions pile up unanswered, contracts get signed unread, and counsel is engaged only after a problem has already become expensive. The retainer model addresses this directly — for a predictable monthly fee, your company has an attorney who knows your business and is available when questions come up.
A retainer changes when you ask for legal advice. With hourly billing, every question carries a meter, so teams ration their questions and lawyers hear about problems late. With a retainer, asking early is free at the margin — which is exactly when legal input is cheapest and most useful. The scope and fee are set in a written agreement up front, sized to your company's actual volume of work, and revisited as the company grows.
What's Included
Of Counsel engagements are built around the recurring legal work of a software company. The core of most engagements is contract review and drafting — customer agreements, vendor contracts, NDAs, and employment and contractor agreements — alongside ongoing IP counsel: invention disclosure triage, open-source questions, trademark issues, and coordination of patent filings. Beyond that, the engagement covers the general legal questions that come up in operating a business: corporate housekeeping, compliance questions, employment issues, and an honest first read on anything unusual that lands on your desk.
When a matter falls outside our practice — a tax question, a securities filing, litigation in another state — we say so, and we help you find and manage the right counsel for it. Part of the general counsel function is knowing what to handle and what to refer.
- Contract review, drafting, and negotiation
- Ongoing IP strategy and portfolio coordination
- Corporate compliance for software companies
- General legal questions, answered as they arise
- Coordination of outside counsel for matters beyond scope
Who It Fits
The model fits companies in the gap between “no lawyer” and “in-house legal department”: startups past their first customers, funded companies whose contract volume is growing, and established software businesses that want continuity of counsel rather than one-off engagements. It works particularly well for technology companies because so much of their recurring legal work — licensing, IP, development agreements — sits squarely within our practice.
It is not the right fit for everyone. A company with a single discrete matter is usually better served by a flat-fee or hourly engagement, and a company with heavy daily legal volume may genuinely need a full-time hire. We will tell you which one you are.
Compared to Hiring Full-Time
A full-time in-house attorney is a significant fixed cost — salary, benefits, and overhead — that most companies do not approach needing until well into their growth. An Of Counsel retainer delivers the parts of that function most companies actually use: a known attorney, familiar with your business and your documents, reachable without a new engagement letter each time. When your legal volume eventually does justify an in-house hire, an outside counsel who knows your company can make that transition smooth — and keep handling the patent and IP work an in-house generalist typically sends out anyway.
How We Help
- Outsourced general counsel for technology companies
- Ongoing legal advisory retainers
- Corporate compliance for software companies
Ready to Protect Your Innovation?
Schedule a confidential consultation to discuss your intellectual property needs.