As fractional General Counsel, I provide ongoing legal support across the organization, working with leadership teams, boards, employees, and outside counsel as needed. I can serve as your primary legal resource, complement an existing legal team, or help provide additional capacity during periods of growth or change.
Because the relationship is ongoing, I get to know how the organization works: its people, priorities, risk tolerance, history, and ways of making decisions. Good legal advice requires context, and that context is gained from understanding the organization. The work depends on what your organization actually needs. It may include:
Day-to-Day Legal Counsel & Decision Support
A place to bring the questions that arise while running an organization, including the ones nobody is quite sure are legal questions yet. I help identify what matters, assess legal and practical risk, and work with the right people to decide what happens next.
Commercial Contracts
Drafting, reviewing, and negotiating customer, vendor, licensing, partnership, services, and other commercial agreements. I also help build templates, playbooks, approval processes, and contracting systems that make it easier to get agreements done without creating unnecessary friction.
Employment & People
Counsel on employee relations, policies, investigations, hiring and separation issues, reorganizations, compensation and pay equity, and other sensitive workplace matters. When specialized employment counsel is appropriate, I can help manage that relationship and integrate their advice into the organization’s broader decision-making.
Corporate Governance & Boards
Working with executives and boards on governance, corporate decision-making, board and committee matters, policies, entity management, fiduciary considerations, and the practical systems needed to support good governance as an organization grows.
I can also help manage the ongoing work of the board, including planning and preparing for meetings, developing board materials and communications, onboarding new directors, providing governance training, and building and maintaining board portals and related processes. The goal is not simply to satisfy governance requirements, but to help create a board environment where directors have the information, context, and systems they need to contribute effectively.
Financings, Transactions & Exits
Financings, mergers and acquisitions (M&A), and other significant transactions can create an enormous amount of legal and operational work very quickly, often spanning different specialties and parts of the organization.
Diligence is partly an exercise in storytelling: understanding the business, identifying issues and their context, and making sure the company can tell a clear and accurate story about itself before someone else starts telling it for them. I help leadership teams prepare for and manage that process from the company’s perspective, including overseeing diligence, coordinating internal teams and advisors, managing outside counsel, supporting board and stockholder processes, and keeping the many workstreams moving toward close. I can serve as a translation layer between specialist counsel and the organization, helping make sure advice has the right business context, the right people are involved, and outside counsel is used efficiently.
After closing, I can help with integration, governance changes, and implementation of transaction commitments.
Privacy, Security & Compliance
Helping organizations understand which requirements actually apply and translating them into policies, processes, and controls that people can use. This may include compliance with U.S. and international privacy and data protection laws, including GDPR, CCPA/CPRA, and other U.S. state privacy laws, as well as security, AI governance, regulatory compliance, incident response, and customer or partner compliance requirements.
I can also support certification and assurance efforts, including SOC 2, ISO 27001, and Cyber Essentials Plus, by helping develop and maintain policies, coordinate legal and compliance workstreams, address contractual and regulatory requirements, and work alongside security teams, auditors, and other specialists.
Product, Intellectual Property & Marketing
Counseling product, engineering, marketing, and business teams on new products and services, AI and data use, advertising and marketing, intellectual property, licensing, open source, product terms, customer communications, and other legal questions that arise as products, technology, and business models evolve.
I also help organizations develop and execute practical IP strategies, including understanding what intellectual property they have, determining what is worth protecting and how, and identifying opportunities to leverage their IP portfolio in support of the business.
Legal Operations, Technology & Enablement
Building and improving the systems behind the legal work, including intake, contracting processes, templates, knowledge management, budgeting, developing and tracking legal KPIs, and other workflows. I can also help identify, evaluate, and demo legal technology; define requirements and scope; and support selection and implementation, including contract lifecycle management (CLM) systems.
I help build legal capability across the organization through practical training and resources for boards, leadership teams, managers, and employees. Training may cover contracting, employment, privacy and security, compliance, AI, intellectual property, governance, and other legal issues relevant to people’s roles.
When specialized legal expertise is needed, I can help identify, engage, and manage outside counsel, translate specialist advice into practical decisions, and make sure you’re using the right lawyer for the matter to get the best results.
Flexible pricing by design
Not every organization needs the same amount of legal support, and those needs change over time.
Tend offers both hourly and subscription-based engagements. We can work together on a specific issue, establish ongoing fractional General Counsel support, or adjust the level of support as your organization grows and changes.
Subscription arrangements provide a set amount of legal support each month, giving you predictable access to counsel without committing to a full-time hire. Hourly engagements provide flexibility when your needs are more occasional or difficult to predict.
We’ll choose the structure that makes sense for the work and revisit the structure to ensure that you are receiving the right level of support.
