There is a series of aspects that defines fractional gernal counsel services, falling into essentially threeseparate aspects:
1. Outsourced General Counsel Services are cheaper for business law than traditional business law firms.
One of the main features characterizing outsourced general counsel services is that they are cheaper, usually much cheaper, than traditional law firms or traditional in-house lawyers for three basic reasons: First, the overhead is very low. There is none of the bells and whistles – the marble and the leather and the chrome – that characterize traditional law offices. There is also none of the high salary,office space, employee benefits, and other perks accorded to the in-house lawyer when working in the traditional GC capacity. Instead, fractional general counsel lawyers work from the beach, from home, from wherever they want to work. Their office is their notebook computer and the smartphone, and their main effort is not spending money on wowing the client but actually performing the wow lawyering.
Perhaps more important, because the businesses are consistent repeat clients for the business lawyer, and because the business lawyer is acting more like a general counsel and not accounting for every one-tenth hour (6 minutes) of the lawyer’s time to increase billables, billable hours flow from efficient service, rather than legal services flowing from an effort to maximize billable hours.
2. Fractional General Counsel Services are more dedicated than traditional law firms
Most law firms are a black box. You don’t know who is doing the actual work, whether someone you have actually met or a faceless service lawyer who does the actual work while the facetime partner interacts with the actual clients. This is a problem because you want the same person doing the work to be the same person you are talking to, to ensure that there’s no broken telephone effect going on.
By contrast, good outsourced general counsel services are dedicated to your business, and there’s an identity between the lawyer you speak with and the attorney who actually doing the work, they’re the same person, and so they’re on the same page as you are. Moreover, they are dedicated to you because they know that the way to continue is to personally do good work for you. They know you and you know them, so the only way they continue working for you is to serve you in the way you deem appropriate.
3. Outsourced In-House Counsel Services are available for exactly the amount of time you need.
The difference between a full-time in-house general counsel and a fractional in-house counsel is that a company gets to order just the amount of legal services it needs and wants. By contrast, if you hire a full-time in-house lawyer, you’re stuck with him full-time or even if part-time, it’s just not as flexible as fractional general counsel services, which are as much or as little as you need, on demand.
To find the best fractional general counsel services, it’s a good idea to turn to a platform that embodies the above points and philosophy of work.
