Legal team at capacity

Your GC is redlining the ninth vendor NDA this week.

You did not hire a General Counsel to process routine paper. But routine paper does not stop arriving, and it is the work that expands to fill whatever time is left.

Small in-house teams fail in a predictable way. The strategic work — the commercial structure, the regulatory question, the deal that needs real thought — is the work that can be postponed. So it is. Meanwhile the queue of NDAs, order forms and vendor paper cannot be postponed, because someone is waiting on each one.

Six months in, the GC is a very expensive contracts administrator and the strategic work is still undone.

What we take

The bottom two thirds of the queue: NDAs, standard customer paper, vendor and procurement contracts, DPAs, renewals, the negotiation rounds. Everything that follows a pattern once a playbook exists.

What stays with you

Anything that requires knowing your business from the inside. Board matters, employment, the deal where the commercial structure is the actual question, and every call about how much risk this company is willing to take.

The queue, Monday morning

Eleven documents. One of them matters.

Four mutual NDAs on counterparty paper. Three order-form renewals. Two vendor DPAs. A reseller agreement for a new channel partner. And one enterprise MSA where the customer wants uncapped liability for data breach and your CRO wants it signed by Thursday.

Ten of these follow a pattern and should never reach your GC. The eleventh should have their full attention. Today it gets whatever is left after the other ten.

Mutual NDA · counterparty template§ 4 Term of obligations

4.1The obligations herein shall survive for two (2) yearsfive (5) years from the date of disclosure, and indefinitely with respect to trade secrets. Recipient may use Residuals retained in unaided memory without restriction.

NDA · 4 of 4Same day

How it fits

Overflow, not replacement.

01

Your playbook governs

We work to your positions, not ours. If your company accepts a $2m liability cap and never uncapped indemnities, that is written down and we hold that line without asking you each time.

02

Escalation is defined

We agree in advance what comes back to you: deviations from playbook, deals above a threshold, anything novel. Everything else closes without reaching your inbox.

03

Your GC stays in charge

We are additional capacity reporting into your legal function, not a parallel one. Your GC sees what they want to see and nothing they do not.

If you do not have a playbook

Most teams at this stage do not, or have one that stopped being accurate two funding rounds ago. Building it is the first thing we do, and it is included on the Legal Desk. It is also the artefact with the longest shelf life — it keeps working whether or not you keep working with us.

Next step

Start with the queue, not a call.

Send us the contracts your team has not got to this week. We will clear them and you can judge the work rather than the pitch.

Book a contract call