FGC: Why your next strategic hire should be a fractional General Counsel
27th November, 2025
There are many legal considerations for growing businesses to navigate when it comes to mitigating risk and protecting their value.
However, the cost of a full-time General Counsel or in-house support or outsourcing all legal work can often be out of reach for those looking for the necessary commercial legal expertise. As a result, many are turning to fractional General Counsel (FGC) arrangements.
Why are businesses choosing fractional General Counsel?
A fractional General Counsel is usually an individual, placed with your business on a part-time or fractional basis. Fractional arrangements have become an enticing solution for businesses as it gives them access to highly experienced legal experts on a flexible basis, tailored to their needs and ambitions. Often those individuals have knowledge and experience within a particular industry sector.
What are the benefits of FGC?
The cost-efficiency of engaging a fractional General Counsel service is an undeniable advantage. Businesses gain senior-level legal expertise without bearing the full salary, benefits, and recruitment costs associated with a permanent hire.
The FGC model also allows for total flexibility. As your needs evolve, the scope of work can expand, change direction or reduce accordingly, ensuring you always have the resource you need with a budget to match.
For fast growing SMEs that are looking to grow and embed a legal function to ensure they lock in value and mitigate risk in particular, this approach provides an agile way to undertake the legal work they need to grow, while competing with larger rivals who have extensive in-house legal teams or fully outsourced legal expertise.
As a business grows, the scope for legal work increases, as does the scrutiny. Having an expert legal professional working with your business who has been there and done it enables you to operate proactively. This allows you to get ahead and put in place processes, policies and mitigation, and prevents incurring the significant costs that come with relying on external ad-hoc support to tackle issues and problems as they arise, such as compliance, trade mark infringements and data protection.
Fractional General Counsel as a service
Ward Hadaway’s FGC service is an innovative hybrid model for fast growing businesses, which brings the depth of expertise and strategic perspective of an in-house general counsel but with the added resource of a wider team of specialist expertise. Operating on a part-time or project basis, this model is particularly suited to organisations experiencing growth or transformation, where legal demands fluctuate but consistent high-quality oversight is required.
Our fractional General Counsel service gives you access to a key lawyer to seamlessly plug into your business, who will understand the industry you work in and your growth goals, enabling them to deliver pragmatic, commercial advice to suit your specific needs. Our subject matter experts can also be overlayed into this support (for example to deal with early stage disputes, data protection issues or intellectual property protection).
Ask us about FGC
As a UK Top 100 law firm, our team is made up of full-service expertise that is on the pulse of developments in the wide array of sectors and legal fields in which we operate. This means that, on top of having a legal partner who truly understands your business, industry and goals, you have access to specialists across the full spectrum of commercial law, helping you to approach any legal hurdles that come your way with confidence.
If you have any questions about fractional General Counsel and how it could make a key strategic difference for your business, please contact Matthew Cormack.
Please note that this briefing is designed to be informative, not advisory and represents our understanding of English law and practice as at the date indicated. We would always recommend that you should seek specific guidance on any particular legal issue.
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