Outside General Counsel for California companies.
Three tiers — Foundation, Partner, Embedded — sized to the legal load and priced against the alternative of hiring in-house. No headcount, no ramp.
There's a stage between 'I don't need a lawyer' and 'I should hire one in-house' where most California companies live for a long time. The legal-load is too high to handle as one-off engagements but too low to justify a $250K/year hire. Outside General Counsel fills exactly that gap.
We sized three tiers around real California company patterns. Foundation handles routine load — contracts, employment questions, vendor agreements — for founder-led companies. Partner adds judgment-level coverage for growth-stage companies running multi-employee teams. Embedded matches a full-time GC's functional coverage for late-stage companies that don't want to onboard the headcount.
How retainers actually work
Each tier has a monthly retainer with a defined hours-per-month cap. Hours roll over within a 90-day window. If you blow through the cap on a one-time matter, the overage gets quoted as separate scope rather than billed at hourly rates against the retainer.
Specialized work that falls outside OGC scope is handled two ways: transactional matters we do (M&A, major contracts) get quoted as separate flat-fee engagements; matters we don't do (litigation, equity financings, securities) get referred to specialists we trust. We don't pretend to be generalists for matters that need specialists.
Tell us what you're working on.
Every engagement starts with a short discovery call. We figure out whether the work is one we can take and what it costs — before any retainer.