It used to be a truism that “The Law is a harsh mistress.” That meant a harsh business law environment not just for the lawyers themselves, but for most clients as well. That was the way things used to be almost universally before outsourced fractional general counsel services or fractional in-house GC services for business law.
For lawyers, historically the law being a harsh mistress meant very simply that the billable hour was king – racking up one-tenth hour increments every six minutes so that the firm would be profitable. Even if the life of the lawyer degenerated into a taxi-meter-style existence of six-minute clicks on the legal fee meter. That meant all kinds of questionable practices – working slowly, increasing the number of lawyers on teams, even padding hours that weren’t really worked efficiently at all. There was seldom a day that went by when billing was not the name of the game, unless it was fishing for clients for whom high billables wouldn’t be an object.
This had a few negative effects: Smaller to mid-size businesses were priced out of the market. They simply couldn’t afford the open-ended billing practices that would see even small matters entailing a very high legal fee. So they would turn to cut-rate non-lawyer packages like those of Rocket Lawyer or “Law in a Box.” Lawyers, for their part, were incentivized not to be efficient at client service but rather to be Olympic contenders at billing very long billable hours. The legal fees were driving the legal service, instead of the legal services driving the legal fees.
Then a paradigm shift happened. It was called outsourced fractional general counsel services. Fractional GC services meant that all of a sudden, smaller to medium-sized businesses could afford a business lawyer. And the law was no longer such a harsh mistress because the best in-house fractional GC services operated remotely, both reducing the costly overhead of traditional law firms – drastic savings that could be passed on to the client in the form of bargain legal fees – and allowing more convenient ways of lawyering, both for attorneys and their business clients, via remote video conferencing and other forms of electronic communication. So all of a sudden, instead of paying a substantial six-figure salary for a full-time in-house general counsel, smaller to medium-sized companies could pay only a tiny of fraction of that – and only for the amount of business legal services they needed.
Moreover, lawyers themselves were freed to practice law from wherever they wanted to, comfortably and remotely, whether that was from their home, a co-working space, or even the beach. Not only wasn’t the law a harsh mistress anymore, being an attorney could be downright – dare we say it? – fun and rewarding too. With a work-life balance that until then only the tech sector had really enjoyed routinely. This trend was reinforced with by the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, which made remote working the norm.
However, not all outsourced fractional general counsel services are the same. So when choosing a fractional GC service, make sure that the fees are low, the communication remote, and the platform a quality fractional GC services platform. And not just another harsh mistress in disguise.
