As stagflation and recession or alternatively deflation is looking increasingly likely, it’s important as a small- to mid-size business to cut costs. One of the best ways to do so is via the use of outsourced fractional general counsel services. What are those services? Quite simply the way for even a business on a budget to harness an experienced in-house business lawyer to be dedicated to your business for only a small fraction of the cost of traditional law firm attorneys or full-time in-house GC services. You get to choose the lawyer’s time commitment, from part-time or half-time up to almost full-time. In short, as long as your business requires.
But as with any other service, to get the best outsourced fractional GC services out there, you need to understand what makes a service the best and what makes others fall short. The following is a quick list of factors that distinguish the best from the… well, not so good.
Your fractional in-house business general counsel service should:
Never bill you by the hour but rather by predictable and low monthly fees
You shouldn’t be subject to the traditional law firm’s billable hours trap: Lawyers have to maximize hours and keep track of every six minutes (one-tenth of an hour), so they work very slowly and inefficiently and try to maximize time instead of maximizing service and efficiency. They will also charge you law-firm-level billing rates for what they do. We are talking about $375, $400, $500 per hour, and even more. That means that every 6 minutes can cost $50. And that’s just insane and not something that a smaller or mid-size business can handle when faced with stagflation – inflation, recession – or deflation, where funds are scarce.
By contrast, a good fractional GC service will bill you predictable, low monthly rates that cover up to a given amount of work, and they’ll never nickel-and-dime you on the 6-minute increments. This monthly model of approximate hours incentivizes the lawyer to work efficiently and put the service of your business as the number one priority rather than billable hours at your business’s expense.
Be personally dedicated to you and not shuffle you off to some junior attorneys you don’t know and who don’t have experience
Often the big fish get the attention of traditional law firms. And even they don’t know exactly who is doing their legal work. Because the smiling partner who welcomes them for coffee at the law firm in the high-priced gleaming office is not necessarily the lawyer who will do their actual legal work. Instead, some young associate in a cubicle in Sub-basement B will be performing the actual work for them, and that young lawyer both lacks experience and lacks direct knowledge of you and your business. So it just becomes a matter of some kind of rough guesswork.
Instead, pick a service where who you see is who you get: A dedicated business lawyer who will be personally performing the work for you. That way, you get the attorney’s business law experience as well as the security of knowing that that lawyer knows you and your business, so there’s no issue of a broken telephone.
Be part of a platform that makes it easy to work with the fractional in-house general counsel attorney remotely
Because fractional general counsel services remove all the useless and expensive overhead, they can provide remote legal services cheaply via video conference and other means of electronic communication. But that very remoteness needs to work well. Make sure to choose a service in which scheduling meetings, chats, billing, and document storage is easy. Should be just the click of a button, so you don’t waste precious time miscommunicating and missing your dedicated in-house legal counsel.
In short, make sure that the dedicated fractional general counsel services are based on a good platform that will make all the communications and the administrative issues like retrieving your documents and payments simple and easy.
If you pay attention to those important issues, you can be confident that you will have the best outsourced fractional general counsel services out there.
