When legal support becomes a bottleneck to scaling

Imagine a founder who just closed a Series A.

The company is scaling fast. Headcount is growing, new markets are opening, customers are signing larger contracts. The board expects ambition and speed. The internal plan shows a 3x growth trajectory over the next 18 to 24 months.

This is usually the moment when legal starts to feel different.

Up to now, external counsel worked fine. A financing here, a contract review there. But suddenly, legal questions are everywhere. Hiring plans trigger employment issues. Commercial teams want faster turnaround on contracts and more tailoring to individual customer needs. Investors expect clean governance. Regulatory questions appear where none existed before.

And with every new question, the legal spend creeps up.

Invoices arrive with little predictability. Simple clarifications turn into billable calls. Founders start hesitating before picking up the phone. Not because the advice is not good, but because every interaction feels expensive. Big law firms are excellent at serving corporations, but startup founders are far more cost-aware, especially when legal spend competes with hiring, product, and growth.

At the same time, hiring a full-time in-house lawyer feels premature.

The need for legal support is real, but uneven. Workloads spike around fundraising, hiring, or major deals, then drop during quieter periods where a full-time hire is underutilized. At the same time, no single in-house counsel covers every area, from employment and corporate to IP and regulatory, which means continued reliance on external specialists. As internal legal capacity grows, attention often expands beyond urgent priorities, increasing scope, cost, and coordination. In practice, founders end up paying twice: for in-house capacity and for external expertise.

This is the gap fractional legal counsel is designed to fill.

What fractional legal counsel looks like in practice

Fractional legal counsel sits between purely external law firms and a full in-house hire. It is not about replacing external counsel, and it is not about building a legal department too early.

It is about giving founders reliable, cost effective and easy access legal support that scales with the company.

At Alfred, fractional legal counsel starts with a single point of contact. One legal partner who knows the company, the cap table, the investors, and the growth plans. Someone founders can communicate as if it was a team member, for example through company internal messaging channels, instead of drafting formal emails or scheduling billable calls.

Behind that single point of contact sits a full team of legal experts across corporate, employment, commercial, IP, data protection, and regulatory topics. Founders do not need to figure out which specialist to call. Alfred tailors the best resource for each request, without adding friction or surprise costs.

Pricing is transparent and structured as a service package. Founders know what legal support costs each month, and what it covers. No mental calculation before asking a question. No hesitation to involve legal early, when it still saves time and money.

Often, it really is just one message away. Fast responses, high-quality legal input, and support that fits a startup budget, without turning every question into a major expense.

A good example is EthonAI:

As the company scaled, legal questions touched many areas at once. Employment matters around hiring, incentives, and terminations came up alongside increasingly complex commercial negotiations, from NDAs to master service agreements with large corporate customers. Investor discussions raised governance and structural questions, while expansion plans required coordinated support between Switzerland and the US.

Instead of managing multiple law firms or committing to an early in-house hire, the team worked with Alfred as fractional legal counsel, using a single point of contact to navigate these topics and bring in the right expertise when needed.

Legal support became part of day-to-day operations. Often, it was just one Slack message away. Alfred handled the prioritization, brought in the right expertise when needed, and kept the focus on what mattered for the business at that stage.

This is what founders often underestimate. Speed does not come from cutting legal out. It comes from integrating legal into the business in a way that matches how startups actually operate.

A different way to think about legal support

For founders, the real question is not whether legal matters. It clearly does.

The question is how to access legal judgment that keeps up with their pace, respects budget constraints, and supports decision-making instead of slowing it down.

Fractional legal counsel is one answer to that question.

If you are a founder navigating growth, fundraising, or scale-up complexity, you can learn more about how we work with founders in the scaling phase here.

And if you want to explore whether fractional legal counsel is the right setup for your company, you can book a call with Alfred to talk it through.