How to hire a fractional General Counsel in the UK
What the seat covers and costs is on the fractional General Counsel page. This is the part that usually goes unwritten: how to interview for it, what should be true by day ninety, and when this hire is the wrong answer entirely.
UK day rates for the seat run £800–£1,400. All eleven seats compared →
Six questions to ask, and what a strong answer sounds like
Every question here asks for something that happened, not something they believe. An operator who has genuinely held the seat answers from memory; one who has advised from the sidelines answers in the abstract, and the difference is audible within a minute.
1. Tell me about a deal you advised the business to walk away from, and one where you got a risky clause over the line. How did you decide which was which?
Listen for: A strong answer weighs the exposure against what the deal was worth and ends in a recommendation someone acted on. A weak answer lists the risks on both and leaves the deciding to the client, which is exactly what you are trying to stop paying law firms for.
2. An enterprise customer sends a forty page MSA on their paper with uncapped liability. Walk me through your first pass.
Listen for: Strong candidates triage: liability cap, indemnities, IP ownership, data terms, then concede the rest quickly because a company your size cannot fight every clause. A weak answer is a full mark-up treating everything as equally important, which kills deals slowly.
3. What stays with you and what goes to a firm, and how do you keep the firm's bill down when it does?
Listen for: You want a clear line, typically litigation, specialist tax and contentious employment go out, plus habits like fixed fees and tight instructions. Be wary of anyone who claims to handle everything; that is not seniority, it is not knowing their limits.
4. How would you get our contracting to the point where sales can send most agreements without waiting for you?
Listen for: The strong answer is templates plus a playbook of pre-agreed fallback positions and a threshold above which deals escalate. A weak answer keeps every contract crossing their desk, which is a bottleneck for you and a billing model for them.
5. In your last in-house seat, what did you do when the board wanted to do something you thought was legally marginal?
Listen for: Strong answers put the risk in commercial terms, documented the advice, and offered a route that got most of what the board wanted. Weak answers either folded quietly or blocked the decision with no alternative, and both make you regret the hire.
6. Where does UK GDPR actually bite for a business like ours, and what would you check in the first week?
Listen for: Listen for specifics scaled to your business: lawful bases, processor agreements, international transfers, retention, how a subject access request would actually be handled. A weak answer is a policy pack and staff training, which is paperwork rather than practice.
Red flags
- Marks up every clause with the same energy. A GC who cannot tell you which three points in a contract actually matter becomes the bottleneck your sales team complains about within a month.
- Has no fallback positions. Ask what they typically concede on a liability cap, and if the answer is a shrug and it depends, they have never run a negotiation playbook, only individual negotiations.
- Talks about risk without ever asking what the deal is worth. Advice that ignores the number on the contract is a list of caveats, and you can get those cheaper from a firm.
- Vague about their practising certificate or insurance. A current SRA practising certificate and their own professional indemnity cover are the baseline for this seat, and checking takes two minutes.
What day ninety should look like
Agree these before they start, in writing, in the brief. A fractional engagement without a ninety-day marker drifts into a retainer nobody remembers the point of.
- Your customer contract templates rebuilt, with a short playbook of fallback positions, so sales can close standard deals without a legal review on each one.
- External legal spend mapped and under management: what each firm is actually for, routine work moved to fixed or capped fees, and any firm that was billing out of habit gone.
- A data protection position you could show a customer or an investor: records of processing, processor agreements in place, and a written list of the gaps that remain with dates against them.
When a fractional General Counsel is the wrong answer
- You are in live litigation or facing a regulatory investigation. That needs a specialist firm today; a fractional GC can instruct and manage that firm, but hiring one instead of it costs you weeks you do not have.
- You need one document: a single contract reviewed or terms of business drafted. Pay a solicitor a fixed fee for the document. A fractional seat only makes sense once legal questions arrive most weeks.
- The gap is really company secretarial: filings, board minutes, registers, option paperwork admin. A company secretary or your accountant covers that at a fraction of £800 to £1,400 a day.
If one of those is you, say so in a brief anyway and we will tell you straight. Sometimes the honest answer is interim or full-time, and pointing that out costs us nothing because the operator never pays us either way.
What to put in the brief
- List what is actually on the desk: the contracts waiting, the round you are planning, the honest state of your data protection. A brief that says general legal support attracts generalists; a real workload attracts the right person.
- Put decision rights in writing: what they can sign off alone, what needs a founder, and the contract value above which a deal goes to the board. Experienced GCs turn down seats where they advise endlessly but never decide.
- Say which law firms you use and what they cost you last year. Founders always leave this out, and getting that spend under management is usually the fastest way this seat pays for itself.
Two ways in, one of them free
Browse verified fractional fractional general counsel on the bench and book direct at no cost, or brief Operator Search and we run the interviews above for you.