Your company just crossed $2 million in revenue. You have 30 employees, several enterprise contracts in negotiation, and a product roadmap that keeps adding features—some of which your engineers quietly call “the secret sauce.”
You are also routing every contract through whichever lawyer is available when it arrives.
Here is the question I hear in different forms: At what point do I need my own general counsel?
The answer does not turn on a single revenue figure, employee count, or number of contracts. The better question is whether the company now has enough recurring legal work and exposure that handling each issue as an isolated event no longer makes sense.
The Full-Time Math May Not Work Yet
Hiring a full-time general counsel can involve a substantial fixed commitment, including compensation, benefits, recruiting expenses, and overhead. Whether that investment makes sense depends on the company’s location, industry, legal workload, risk profile, and growth plans.
A company with between $1.5 million and $3 million in revenue and between 10 and 75 employees may not yet have enough legal work to occupy a full-time general counsel. Those figures are not legal thresholds. They describe the type of growing company for which the Garcia-Zamor Law Firm designed its Premium fractional-general-counsel service.
A business at that stage may nevertheless have contracts requiring meaningful negotiation, workforce issues requiring consistent attention, and technology that has never been evaluated as intellectual property. That is the gap: the company may need legal judgment integrated into its operations without needing a full-time legal department.
Why Call a Lawyer When Something Breaks Stops Working
Many growing software companies begin by calling outside counsel when a distinct problem arises. That approach may be workable while legal issues are infrequent and unrelated.
It becomes less effective when the company is negotiating several contracts, hiring employees and contractors, developing proprietary technology, and making product decisions that create overlapping legal consequences.
The concern is not that reactive legal advice lacks value. The concern is that some options narrow after the company signs the contract, ends the employment relationship, discloses the technology, or releases the feature. Earlier review can identify language to negotiate, documents to complete, or protection questions to evaluate while the company still has practical flexibility.
That does not mean prevention is always cheaper than cleanup. It means that recurring legal review can reduce avoidable exposure and help management make decisions with a clearer understanding of the tradeoffs.
What Embedded Counsel Can Look Like at This Stage
Fractional general counsel is intended to occupy the space between occasional project-based advice and a full-time internal hire.
The Garcia-Zamor Law Firm’s Premium tier is described as costing $5,000 per month and is designed for companies in the revenue and employee ranges discussed above. The service includes contract review and negotiation, day-to-day counsel support, quarterly board-meeting attendance, intellectual-property portfolio oversight, risk management, and priority response within one business day.
Those are service terms, not legal requirements or universal market benchmarks. They should be confirmed against the firm’s current engagement materials before publication or use.
The larger distinction is not only price. It is continuity. Counsel who regularly works with the company can understand its contracting positions, personnel structure, technology, ownership history, and tolerance for risk. That context can make each new question easier to evaluate.
For a software company, combining operational advice with intellectual-property oversight can be especially useful. The contractor agreement signed this month may affect ownership of code developed next month. A customer contract may grant rights in improvements to the platform. A product feature may raise patent, copyright, trade-secret, licensing, or third-party-rights questions.
Handling those subjects through a coordinated relationship can reduce the chance that a business issue will be reviewed without recognizing its intellectual-property consequences, or vice versa.
The Real Question Is Exposure
The practical question is not simply, When do I need a general counsel? It is, How much important activity is going unreviewed?
Consider whether significant customer and vendor contracts are being signed without meaningful negotiation. Consider whether employment and contractor agreements clearly address the rights relevant to the work being performed. Consider whether product decisions are being made without anyone evaluating ownership, protection, licensing, or infringement risk.
None of those concerns automatically requires a full-time hire. They may indicate that the company has reached the point where a continuing counsel relationship is more useful than a series of disconnected assignments.
If a contract, personnel decision, compliance issue, or product feature is already causing concern, begin with that specific issue. It will usually reveal more about the company’s need for ongoing support than an abstract discussion about headcount or revenue.
The Garcia-Zamor Law Firm serves as general counsel and fractional general counsel for businesses and innovators, helping protect business operations and intellectual property. The firm can be contacted through its website or at (410) 531-9853.
