We are contract-heavy, moving fast, and not ready for a General Counsel — but the paper is starting to bite.
The threshold arrives quietly: enterprise customers with their own paper, a data-protection questionnaire, a first senior hire, a term sheet. We are the function that handles all of it at once.
Dinmore Bell provides a retained General Counsel function to start-ups and scale-ups at the point legal questions arrive faster than founders can answer them — usually the first enterprise contract, the first raise, or the first ten employees. Regulated fundraising advice and EMI valuations come from instructed specialists.
How we own it
Customer paper at speed
Your MSA and playbook, then the redlines run for you — so a procurement cycle is not the reason a quarter slips.
Investor-ready housekeeping
Cap table, option paperwork, IP assignments and board minutes in order before diligence, not during it.
Hiring without incident
Contracts, covenants, right-to-work and the first performance problem, handled properly the first time.
Where specialists come in
Regulated fundraising advice, tax structuring and EMI valuations are provided by instructed specialists under our coordination.
Related results
All results →Services we run here
Related insights
All insights →Where nine per cent of your revenue goes
Contract value rarely leaks in a single expensive event. It leaks quietly, through renewal dates nobody owns.
What a fully loaded General Counsel actually costs
The comparison is not our fee against an hourly rate. It is our fee against the hire you would otherwise make.
- When should a start-up bring in an outsourced General Counsel?
- At the point where legal questions start arriving faster than the founders can answer them — usually the first substantial customer contract, the first raise, or the first ten employees. That is well before hiring in-house counsel is justifiable.
- Can you advise on our funding round?
- We own the commercial layer and the process. Regulated fundraising advice, tax structuring and EMI valuations are provided by instructed specialists under our coordination.
- How does this compare with hiring a first legal hire?
- A fully loaded General Counsel is a six-figure commitment before benefits, and a first legal hire covers one person’s expertise. A retained function costs a fraction of that and brings the specialist bank with it.