Your first legal hire: what the job actually is

The work arrives long before the budget does. What the role actually involves, what a single hire can and cannot absorb, and how to tell which of the three routes your business needs.

Problems, in order · Part of Outsourced General Counsel

There is a moment in a founder-led business when legal work stops being occasional. It is rarely dramatic. A customer sends through their own terms instead of signing yours. A supplier contract renews without anyone noticing. Someone leaves and takes a client list with them. The bank asks for a copy of a shareholders' agreement that was never quite finished.

None of these is a crisis on its own. Together, they are a job.

Most founders reach for the obvious answer: hire a lawyer. Before writing that job advert, it is worth being precise about what the job actually is — because it is not what the job title suggests.

The work is mostly not legal advice

Sit with the inbox of a first in-house lawyer at a hundred-person business and you will find that most of the work is not advisory at all. It is ownership.

Someone has to know what contracts exist. Someone has to know when each of them ends, renews, or can be broken, and act inside the window rather than report on it afterwards. Someone has to decide what the business will and will not accept in a negotiation, and hold that line while the salesperson wants it closed by Friday. Someone has to keep the templates current so the same argument is not had four times a quarter. And someone has to triage: this one is routine, this one needs a specialist, this one needs the founder.

That is a contract ownership job with a legal component, not a legal job with administration attached. Businesses that get this wrong hire an excellent lawyer, give them no register, no system and no authority, and are then surprised when the same problems keep arriving.

Five things the role has to cover

The register. Every contract the business is party to, with the commercial terms abstracted out of it: term, notice period, renewal mechanics, price review, liability cap, termination rights, exclusivity, change of control. Not a folder of PDFs. A register somebody actually reads.

The calendar. Every date in that register, owned by a named person, requiring a decision in advance rather than a reminder afterwards. Almost every expensive contract problem in a growing business is, underneath, a date problem.

The negotiations. Customer terms, supplier terms, distribution agreements, licences and leases arriving every week. The value here is speed and consistency, not brilliance. A business that can turn a customer's paper around in two days from a known position wins work it would otherwise lose to delay.

The queue. The steady flow of questions from operations, sales, HR and finance. Most need a quick, confident answer from someone who knows the business. A few need to stop and go up. Knowing which is which is the skill.

The escalation. Knowing exactly where the line sits — what is handled internally, what goes to a specialist, at what point, with what brief, and at what cost.

What one hire can and cannot absorb

A capable first lawyer covers a surprising amount of that. What they cannot be is a corporate lawyer, an employment lawyer, a commercial litigator, a data protection specialist, an IP practitioner and a real estate lawyer at the same time. Nobody is.

So the business does one of two things. It sends the specialist work out anyway, on top of the salary. Or — worse — it keeps the work in because the budget has already been spent, and has it done by somebody doing it for the first time.

There is also a resilience problem. One person is one person. They take holiday, they get ill, they leave, and a function that lives entirely in one head is a function that stops.

And there is a sequencing problem. The role is usually created at the point of maximum pressure: a funding round, a first very large customer, an expansion into a second country. That is the worst possible moment to start a three-month search, and the moment when an empty seat costs most.

The three ways founders fill it

Hire. Right when the volume genuinely justifies a full-time salary and the work is concentrated enough for one person to hold most of it. The honest test is whether there is a full week of work every week — not whether last month felt busy.

A panel firm, on demand. Right for genuine specialist need. Wrong as the default operating model, because law firms are built to answer the question you asked. They are not built to own a register, hold a calendar, keep templates current, or say no to your sales team. You get good advice on the matter you raised and nothing at all on the matter you did not know to raise.

An outsourced General Counsel function. This is what Dinmore Bell does. The contract estate is taken over and held in one contract control centre — the register, the dates, the templates, the negotiations, the queue and the escalation — with specialists sitting behind it rather than being bought one matter at a time. The fixed cost is shared across clients, so it lands at a fraction of a full-time hire, and it does not stop when one person is away.

Naming all three matters, because they are stages more than competitors. Plenty of businesses run the third for two years and then hire — and the person who arrives finds a register, a system and a live picture of the estate waiting for them, which is a far better first day than a filing cabinet.

Where a specialist is needed

Some work is reserved by law to authorised people, and some is not legal work at all.

Conducting litigation, exercising rights of audience before the courts, the drafting of certain instruments and probate work are reserved legal activities under the Legal Services Act 2007, and are carried out by instructed solicitors and counsel. Tax computation, filing positions and relief claims sit with chartered tax advisers and accountants. Regulatory applications and licence variations usually sit with a specialist in that regulator.

Dinmore Bell holds the commercial position, runs the estate, and instructs and controls those specialists against one scope and one budget. That division is the point. The founder keeps one accountable relationship instead of five, and the specialist bill is smaller because the preparatory work has already been done.

What to do this quarter

If the question is live, do three things before writing the job advert.

List every contract the business is party to, and mark the ones nobody can produce a signed copy of. That list alone tends to settle the argument.

Put every date from those contracts into one calendar, with a name against each.

Then count honestly how many hours a week the last quarter actually generated — not the worst week, the average one.

The answer tells you which of the three routes fits. It also produces the register, which whoever ends up doing the job — employed or not — will need on their first day.