Before your first legal hire
You are about to post a Commercial Counsel role.
Contract volume has outgrown the founders. The obvious answer is to hire a lawyer. Before you do, it is worth being precise about what that hire actually solves and what it does not.
A first in-house lawyer is a good decision at the right time. The failure mode is hiring one early, for the wrong reason, and discovering that a single person cannot be a contracts team, a privacy function, a corporate lawyer and a jurisdiction expert at once.
What one hire gives you
Someone in the building who knows the business, sits in the meetings, and builds institutional memory. That is genuinely valuable and we are not going to pretend otherwise.
What one hire does not give you
Coverage. One lawyer is admitted in one jurisdiction, works one set of hours, takes holidays, and gets sick. They ramp for a quarter before they are productive. They come with recruitment cost, equity, benefits and a severance conversation if the fit is wrong. And on the day your German customer sends a DPA with local law questions, they will refer it out anyway.
11.1Vendor shall indemnify, defend and hold harmless Customer from any and all claims, losses and damages arising out of or relating to this Agreementarising from a third-party claim that the Service infringes such third party’s intellectual property rights.
What this looks like today
Somebody is doing this at midnight.
Usually the CEO or the head of sales, on a customer’s paper, with a search engine open in the next tab. The clause above is real in its shape: a general indemnity that would make the company liable for anything, forever. It is also the single most common thing we change in a customer template, and the one founders most often sign.
Side by side
Honestly compared.
| First in-house hire | Contract Desk | |
|---|---|---|
| Time to productive | One quarter, typically | First contract in 48 hours |
| Jurisdictions covered | One, where admitted | US plus 40+ |
| Coverage when away | None | Team, not a person |
| Commitment | Employment, with exit cost | Cancel monthly |
| Sits in your meetings | Yes — the real advantage | No |
| Knows your business deeply | Over time, yes | Builds up through your playbook |
| Handles litigation | Manages it out | Separate engagement |
If contracts are only a third of the legal work, if you need someone in product and board meetings weekly, or if you are heading into a financing or an acquisition — hire. A desk is not a substitute for a GC. It is a substitute for hiring one too early, and a way to hold the line until the role is genuinely full-time.
A middle path
Run the desk, then hire on evidence.
Companies that do this well put the contracts on a desk first and watch the numbers for two quarters. By the time they open the role, they know their real monthly volume, they have a written playbook the new hire inherits on day one, and they are recruiting for the job they actually have rather than the one they guessed at.
When the hire lands, the desk drops to overflow or comes off entirely. That is a normal ending, and we would rather be the thing you outgrew than the thing you regretted.
Next step
Test it before you post the role.
Send us the contracts sitting in your queue right now. You will know within a week whether this covers the need.