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 — equity financings, M&A, securities, trial-phase litigation — is referred or quoted as a separate engagement. We don't pretend to be generalists for matters that need specialists.
Tell us what you're working on.
Transactional matters start with a short discovery call. We figure out whether the work is one we can take and what it costs — before any retainer.