Before you hire your first in-house lawyer, define the legal function

Before you hire your first in-house lawyer, define the legal function Growing legal demand does not automatically justify a permanent hire. For a business without an internal legal team, the better answer may be a fully outsourced legal function designed around responsibility, executive access and continuity. Legal demand rarely arrives in a tidy, predictable stream. A business may be negotiating several important contracts, entering a new market, dealing with a transaction, managing a sponsorship programme, or simply finding that routine agreements now take too long to move. The pressure is real, but the resourcing question is often framed too quickly. The usual choices are presented as binary: recruit an in-house lawyer or send individual matters to external counsel. Both may be right. But there is a third model that deserves serious consideration: outsource responsibility for the legal function to an experienced provider that operates as part of the business. Workload is not a single problem A rising number of legal requests can conceal several different needs. Each point to a different response: Volume: there is simply more work than the current team can process. Volatility: demand rises and falls, making permanent capacity difficult to size. Complexity: a smaller number of matters need more experienced judgment. Specialisation: the business faces a defined issue outside the team’s usual capability. Proximity: legal input is arriving too late because the advisor is not close enough to commercial decisions. Continuity: knowledge and responsibility are fragmented across several providers or internal owners. Treating all six as ‘we need another lawyer’ risks buying the wrong kind of capacity. The first task is to separate them. Start with the work, not the organisation chart A useful diagnosis does not require a lengthy transformation exercise. A representative sample of legal work, reviewed with the people who request and deliver it, will usually reveal the shape of the need. For each category of work, ask: How often does it arise, and how predictable is it? What commercial value or risk depends on it? What level of judgment is genuinely required? Does the advisor need regular access to operational and executive teams? Where are matters delayed: intake, prioritisation, instruction, negotiation, decision, or execution? Which work must stay close to the business, and which can sensibly be sent to a specialist? This exercise often shows that the problem is not a shortage of legal hours alone. It may be poor triage, unclear ownership, too much senior time spent on repeatable work, or important matters being briefed externally without enough commercial context. Continuity is part of the resourcing decision Career progression can be structurally constrained in a small legal department. Where there is only one senior legal role, or a very lean team, there may be nowhere for a capable lawyer to progress without moving to another organisation or into a broader commercial position. Mobility should not be exaggerated, but it is material. The Association of Corporate Counsel’s 2025 Law Department Compensation Survey found that 28% of participating in-house legal professionals had changed jobs during the preceding two years. The same survey also found that 55% were unlikely or very unlikely to move in the following year. The evidence points to meaningful mobility, not constant churn. The business risk is therefore not simply that a lawyer may leave. It is that legal knowledge, commercial context, relationships, and responsibility may be concentrated in one employee without a reliable system for retaining them. Leave, promotion, resignation, or an unexpected workload increase can all expose the same weakness. Outsourcing does not automatically solve that problem. It merely moves the key-person risk unless the provider works through shared records, reporting, appropriate team coverage, and disciplined handover. Continuity must be designed into the function, whichever resourcing model is chosen. Matching the model to the business A fully outsourced legal function For a business without an internal legal team, a fully outsourced function can be a stronger starting point than appointing one lawyer and expecting that person to cover every level of work. The provider takes clear responsibility for legal intake, priorities, contracting flow, day-to-day advice, coordination of specialists, and reporting to management. This model depends on direct access to the CEO, CFO, and other relevant decision-makers. Without that access, the advisor receives instructions but cannot operate as part of the business. With it, legal input can be aligned with commercial priorities and given early enough to shape decisions rather than merely review them afterwards. The function can also draw on different levels or areas of capability as demand changes. That is often more resilient than placing the entire function, its institutional knowledge, and its availability in a single appointment. Supplementing an existing in-house team Where a capable legal team already exists, the objective is different. Embedded or retainer-based support can add senior capacity for workload peaks, commercial contracting, a temporary vacancy, or a strategic project without displacing the team’s existing responsibility and relationships. The supplementary advisor should operate in support of the general counsel or legal lead, with a clear mandate, sensible boundaries, and a deliberate transfer of knowledge. The value lies in increasing capacity while preserving the internal team’s authority and continuity. Permanent in-house capacity A permanent hire remains a strong option where demand is sustained, reasonably predictable, and substantial enough to support a properly designed role. It also makes sense where daily presence and long-term team development are central to the business’s plans. The trade-off is concentration and commitment. Recruitment takes time, the career path must be considered, and one appointment may not cover every level or speciality required. The business should therefore decide how knowledge, succession, and specialist support will be managed from the outset. External specialist counsel Traditional external counsel remains well suited to bounded matters, specialist legal questions, particular jurisdictions, transactions, and disputes. It is less efficient as the default operating model where the work depends on continuous commercial context, rapid prioritisation, and repeated coordination across the same stakeholders. Four common mistakes 1.Choosing a title before defining the work. A job description built around an assumed solution can hide the real bottleneck. 2.Buying the same level of seniority for every task. Strategic negotiation and routine contract administration do not require identical resources. 3.Comparing hourly rates instead of the operating model. Handoffs, briefing time, delay, duplicated review, and lost context all affect the real cost. 4.Treating outsourcing as overflow only. If the advisor lacks authority, executive access, and commercial context, the business receives extra hands but not a functioning legal capability. What a good, outsourced function looks like A fully outsourced legal function should be managed as part of the business’s operating model rather than as a loose stream of instructions. At minimum, it should define: responsibility for the legal function and the categories of work in scope; direct access to the CEO, CFO, and relevant commercial decision-makers; how new work is received, triaged, prioritised, and allocated; service rhythms, management reporting, and escalation points; the specialist matters or jurisdictions that will remain with other counsel; shared matter records, templates, playbooks, status information, and decision history; appropriate coverage when a particular advisor is unavailable; and how knowledge and responsibility will be handed over if the model changes. These disciplines make outsourced support more accountable, not less. They are also what convert access to an external lawyer into a legal function with institutional memory and continuity. A practical next step Before approving the first legal hire or expanding external spend, define five things: * the work that is accumulating; * the capability it requires; * the duration and variability of demand; * the level of executive access needed; and * how legal knowledge will be retained. Then compare the available models against those requirements. For a business without an internal legal team, a properly designed outsourced function deserves consideration before defaulting to a single permanent appointment. It can provide senior accountability, direct access, scalable capability, and institutional continuity without requiring the business to build the entire function itself. Where an in-house team already exists, the same principles can be adapted to provide additional senior capacity around it. In either case, the legal model should follow the work and the way the business needs legal responsibility to operate. WTC perspective Whipping the Cat’s preferred model is to take responsibility for the complete legal function of a business that does not have an internal legal team, working directly with the CEO, CFO, and relevant commercial leaders. Where an in-house team already exists, WTC can provide additional senior capacity on an embedded, retainer, or project basis. In both cases, the starting point is the work, the required access, and the continuity the business needs. .