Legal retainer and ongoing support
A corporate lawyer who already knows your company, a written order of response agreed in advance, and an answer that comes before the deal is signed.
When you need a lawyer on retainer
Every question starts from scratch
A new lawyer each time reads your documents from the beginning, and you pay for that reading again. The same reading, repeated, is what a retainer removes.
Contracts are signed without review
While you look for someone to read the contract, it gets signed. What gets signed is what the other side drafted, and it was drafted for them.
Legal help shows up only for rounds
Legal help appears when investors ask and disappears afterwards. The paperwork between rounds is what the next round will read.
Your team asks you legal questions
Sales, product and human resources bring questions to a founder who has to guess. The answers become precedents nobody wrote down.
An in-house lawyer is too much
The volume of work does not fill a salary, and the questions are too varied for one person anyway. The load is real; the vacancy is not.
Nobody owns the legal calendar
Renewals, registry filings and notice periods live in different heads. A date that nobody owns is a date that passes quietly.
What a lawyer on retainer does for you
A retainer buys two things that one-off work cannot: a corporate lawyer who already knows your company, and an agreed order in which your questions get answered. The second matters more than it sounds, because waiting is the part you cannot plan around.
The relationship rests on a framework the International Bar Association put forward as a common basis for codes of conduct. A lawyer does not take a matter where your interests conflict with the lawyer’s own, those of another lawyer in the same firm, or another client’s, unless the law, the rules of the profession or — where permitted — your authorisation allows it — which is why we check conflicts before we take a company on. What you tell us stays confidential, unless the law or those rules allow or require disclosure.
What a retainer gives you
- A team that knows your company
- A written scope and its limits
- An agreed order of response
- An answer in writing every time
- A calendar of legal dates
What we take off you
- Contracts: we will draft your own, and review and negotiate the ones that come in — with a short note on what you gave up and why.
- Templates your team can use without us — and the line, written down, where a template stops and a lawyer starts.
- Corporate housekeeping: resolutions, minutes, changes of director or address, and the filings that follow them.
- Questions from your team as they arrive, answered in writing so the answer survives the person who asked.
- The calendar: licence renewals, contractual notice periods and corporate dates, each with a named owner.
What sits outside a retainer
- Representation in a hearing, which is priced as its own matter — the retainer covers getting you ready for it.
- Official fees paid to registries, courts and offices: those are public tariffs and they are yours to pay.
- Work in a country where we are not admitted to practise, which will go through local counsel we brief.
- A large one-off project — a round, a sale, a migration — which sits alongside the retainer and is agreed separately.
- Bookkeeping, tax filings and their deadlines, which are run by accounting support as a service of its own.
How the work reaches us
- One channel for tasks, so a request does not live in three chats and a personal inbox at the same time.
- A named list of people on your side who may set a task, agreed at the start and changed in writing.
- A short form for each task: what happened, what you need and by when — enough to start without a call.
- An answer in writing every time, so the next person asking the same thing can find it.
Four ways to work with us
An agreed monthly volume
A fixed block of work each month, with the order of response agreed in advance.
Time as it is used
We will work by the hour within an approved estimate for each task, and the estimate comes before the work starts.
On call for the team
Your people write to us directly. A short question gets a short answer; anything larger becomes a task in the queue.
A named project
It sits next to a retainer or stands on its own: one defined piece of work with a scope, a deadline and a result.
Stages of work
Intake and the first read — 1 week.
We will read what already exists: the constitutional documents, the contracts in force, the templates in use and the questions nobody closed.
Before any of that we will run a conflicts check: a lawyer does not take a matter where the client’s interests collide with the lawyer’s, another lawyer’s in the same firm, or another client’s, unless the law, the rules of the profession or a permitted authorisation allows it. Finding that out later would break the work off midway.
The map of what you have.
You will get one document: what exists, what is missing, what contradicts what, and what can wait.
The queue and the order of response.
We will agree who on your side can set tasks, how a task is marked urgent, and in what order things get answered when several arrive at once.
The order is worth writing down: unwritten, it gets argued about at the moment something is urgent.
The running month.
Tasks come in, get answered in the agreed order and land in one place. Every answer is written, even when the question came by voice.
The review of repeating questions.
Once a quarter we will look back at what actually came in: which questions repeated, which template is missing, and which risk moved from theory to practice.
The signal is a question that has now arrived three times and still has no template behind it. You can move between formats at the end of a month.
Handover, whenever you want it.
If you bring the work in-house or move on, you get everything: documents, templates, the calendar and the reasoning behind the decisions we took.
Where the aim is to build your own legal function instead of borrowing ours, that is in-house legal setup, and a one-off consultation on a single question is Advisory & Ongoing Support.
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