Fractional General Counsel vs. full-time hire or full outsource: which is right for your business?
3rd December, 2025
As businesses grow, their legal needs inevitably become more complex. From negotiating more valuable and important commercial contracts to navigating data protection laws, the importance of reliable legal support cannot be overstated.
Many businesses reach a point where they must decide whether to hire a full-time general counsel/in-house lawyer, outsource legal work on a traditional basis, or adopt a more flexible approach by engaging a fractional General Counsel. Understanding the differences between these options is key to determining which best suits your business’s stage of growth, budget and strategic priorities.
How is a fractional General Counsel different to an in-house lawyer?
A fractional General Counsel offers legal expertise on a flexible, on-demand basis. A traditional fractional General Counsel would be a senior legal professional with the depth of experience to provide the commercial legal advice you need, but without the fixed costs associated with a permanent hire. It’s emblematic of the post-pandemic shift in ways of working as businesses look to find more efficient solutions amid a challenging economic climate, and is a result of many senior lawyers deciding to handle a small portfolio of businesses outside of the structure of a traditional law firm.
A fractional model provides tailored support that can be scaled up or down depending on your needs. It is particularly attractive to small and mid-sized companies, and growing businesses that require regular legal input but on a more infrequent basis, or with a requirement for key strategic legal work from time to time meaning peaks and troughs in resource.
Of course, larger companies find fractional services useful too, particularly for temporarily filling legal vacancies or adding to their resource for particular projects.
Could a fractional GC be right for my business?
One of the key advantages of fractional GC that businesses are drawn to is flexibility. It enables businesses to engage legal expertise for ongoing support for day-to-day advisory needs. This resource can be dialled up or down or paused on really short notice.
There can also be a significant strategic advantage to the fractional GC model. A highly experienced legal professional comes into your business as a trusted partner with a deep understanding of your industry and the ability to anticipate risks and identify opportunities. This allows them to seamlessly integrate with your business, delivering practical advice aligned with your goals.
A difficulty in a traditional fractional GC is that they will typically only have one area of specialism and focus, meaning that the business needs to further outsource for specialist support.
When full outsourcing or a full-time hire might be best for you
While every organisation will have legalities to address, the scale of these will vary depending on the size of your organisation and the industry you operate in. Larger organisations or those operating in heavily regulated sectors are likely to require constant legal oversight which usually requires significant resource beyond a part-time or fractional solution, this is usually either a full outsource of legal work to a firm like Ward Hadaway, the recruitment of an internal team of permanent senior legal presence, or a combination of the two..
At Ward Hadaway we typically work with larger organisations on a full outsource or support basis by adding our specialist legal and sector knowledge where we can add value.
What is fractional General Counsel as a service?
Ward Hadaway’s innovative fractional general counsel as a service acts as a hybrid between a traditional fractional GC and a fully outsourced service.
Our fractional General Counsel service gives you access to a key lawyer who seamlessly plugs into your business, and who will understand the industry you work in and your growth goals, enabling them to deliver pragmatic, commercial advice to suit your specific needs.
However, our subject matter experts can be overlayed into this support (for example to deal with early stage disputes, data protection issues or intellectual property protection), within the same fixed monthly cost – avoiding the need for further outsourcing, and ensuring you always retain cost certainty on a month to month basis.
As your needs evolve, the scope of work can expand, change direction or reduce accordingly, ensuring you always have the specific expert resource that you need with a budget to match. Ultimately, deciding between a fractional GC, full outsourcing and building your own internal legal team depends on the scale of your business and the complexity of your legal requirements.
Ask Ward Hadaway about fractional General Counsel
At Ward Hadaway, our fractional GC as a service is designed to meet the evolving needs of ambitious businesses. Our team provides commercially-focused legal support embedded within your organisation, giving you access to senior expertise across a wide range of legal disciplines. Ultimately, we give you the platform to focus on growth with the confidence that your legal affairs are in safe hands.
To find out more about your business could benefit from a fractional general counsel, please get in touch with 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.
This page may contain links that direct you to third party websites. We have no control over and are not responsible for the content, use by you or availability of those third party websites, for any products or services you buy through those sites or for the treatment of any personal information you provide to the third party.
