Many SaaS startups and scale-ups reach a stage where legal work can no longer be handled on the fly — a contract reviewed here, an NDA signed there, a GDPR question dealt with in a rush. The volume of issues is growing, the stakes are rising, and the business needs someone who knows the product, the market and the contractual history.
Hiring an in-house lawyer is one solution, but it is not always the right one at this stage. The cost is significant (salary, benefits, management time), the right profile is hard to find (a lawyer who understands SaaS, IP and GDPR in equal measure), and the workload may not yet justify a full-time position.
A fractional CLO is an alternative: I work within your team, one to five days a week, as an in-house legal lead would. The difference is that you get deep sector expertise from day one — no probation period, no training curve — with the flexibility to scale the engagement up or down as your needs evolve.
I plug into your existing tools — Slack, Teams, Notion, Google Drive, or whatever CLM you use. I join internal meetings when it adds value: contract reviews, product discussions, leadership meetings. I handle day-to-day legal matters in real time: drafting and negotiating contracts, fielding client questions, GDPR compliance, trademark filings, and supporting your sales and engineering teams on legal issues as they come up.
The goal is to remove friction. Your sales team is no longer stuck waiting for outside counsel to respond. Your engineers have a legal counterpart who understands their technical constraints. And you, as a founder, reclaim time to focus on strategy instead of managing legal matters yourself.
The fractional CLO model suits a fairly specific set of companies. Early-stage startups signing their first major contracts and not yet ready to hire in-house — the model gives them structured legal support without the cost of a full-time headcount. Scale-ups that already have a lawyer but need specialist reinforcement on a particular front (IP, international contracts, fundraising due diligence). And more mature tech companies that prefer to outsource IT/IP legal work to a specialist rather than build the capability internally.
The question comes up often. My answer is pragmatic: if your legal workload justifies a full-time role and you can recruit a senior profile with sector knowledge, an in-house hire is probably the right call. In every other scenario — workload below full-time threshold, need for immediate specialist expertise, budget constraints, or a transitional period before hiring — the fractional model is a better fit.
Several of my clients started with a two-day-a-week engagement, then hired an in-house lawyer six to twelve months later. The fractional period had given them time to build the legal foundations — contracts, IP, compliance — and the in-house hire was able to hit the ground running.
If this format interests you, the simplest next step is a conversation. Book a call — I will explain how we could structure an engagement based on your needs.
Let's build together to grow your business
I have been supporting software and SaaS companies for over 10 years, helping them structure their business, protect their intellectual property and strengthen their contracts.
