Ongoing contract and operations support
Provide regular legal judgment for agreements, vendors, customers, employment, operations, and growth decisions.
Practice Area
General Counsel
Outside general counsel for leaders who need practical legal judgment across recurring business decisions.
How Souwaidan Law Helps
Focused legal strategy for the decisions that matter most.
Outside general counsel for leaders who need practical legal judgment across recurring business decisions.
Risk review for leadership decisions
Help owners and executives understand legal exposure before committing to important business moves.
Coordination with specialists and stakeholders
Work with accountants, advisors, insurers, lenders, and specialized counsel when matters require it.
Outside counsel without in-house overhead
Give businesses a steady legal point of contact without adding a full internal legal department.
Most companies reach a point where legal questions arrive weekly but do not justify a full-time lawyer. A customer sends back a redlined agreement. An employee leaves for a competitor. A vendor's terms shift liability in a way nobody noticed. Individually none of these warrants hiring; collectively they consume management attention and accumulate risk. Outside general counsel is the arrangement built for that gap: ongoing access to counsel who knows the business, without the cost of an in-house hire.
The difference from project work is continuity. A firm engaged for a single transaction learns the business, completes the matter, and moves on. Outside general counsel retains that context: how the company makes money, which contracts carry the real exposure, what the owners are trying to build, what happened the last time a similar question arose. That context is what allows a fast answer to a routine question, and it is most of what makes in-house counsel valuable.
What to expect is a different rhythm than litigation or a closing. Much of the work is short: reviewing an agreement before it is signed, advising on an employment decision before it is made, deciding whether a demand letter warrants a response or a call. The rest is preventive: getting the template agreements right so they do not need renegotiating each time, keeping entity records current, and making sure the company's actual practices match its written ones.
Souwaidan Law serves as outside general counsel to businesses across Michigan. Engagements are structured around what the business actually needs: a monthly arrangement for companies with steady volume, or an on-call relationship for those with less. Where a matter calls for a specialist, such as litigation in another jurisdiction or a specific regulatory proceeding, that work is coordinated rather than forced into a generalist relationship.
Where Companies Get Exposed
The recurring gaps ongoing counsel is meant to close.
These are the issues that turn up repeatedly in businesses operating without regular legal support.
Signing the other side's paper
Customer and vendor agreements drafted by the counterparty allocate risk to their advantage, particularly in indemnity and limitation of liability terms. Companies sign them because reviewing every agreement feels disproportionate, until one of them matters.
Contractor and employee classification
Treating a worker as a contractor who functions as an employee creates tax and wage exposure that accrues quietly and surfaces all at once, often during an audit or after a departure.
Unowned intellectual property
Paying for work doesn't always mean you own it. Without a written agreement transferring intellectual property rights, contractors may retain ownership of the software, designs, or content they create for your business. That gap can complicate an investment or sale.
A growing business. Outdated records.
As your business evolves, its legal records need to keep pace. Unrecorded ownership changes, overdue filings, and missing approvals can complicate financing, a sale, or a dispute.
Practices that drifted from policy
Handbooks, privacy policies, and terms of service that no longer describe what the company does. A policy that misstates actual practice can be worse than having none.
Waiting too long to ask
The most expensive pattern of all. Most legal problems are cheaper to prevent than to fix, and the cost difference is largest exactly where the question seemed too small to raise.
How the Relationship Works
Structured around what the business actually needs.
The right arrangement depends on volume and predictability, not on company size alone.
Ongoing
Monthly outside counsel
A recurring engagement covering the routine flow of legal questions: contract review, employment issues, vendor terms, and the judgment calls that come up during a normal month. It makes cost predictable and, more usefully, removes the hesitation that causes people to skip a quick call because they are worried about the bill. That hesitation is what lets small problems grow.
- Best suited to
- Companies with steady contract volume or regular employment questions.
- What it covers
- Routine review, advice, and triage; larger matters are scoped separately.
On call
As-needed counsel
The same continuity without a recurring commitment. The firm holds the context (the entity documents, the template agreements, the history) and the company engages as questions arise. Suited to businesses whose legal needs are real but episodic, and often the right starting point before a recurring arrangement makes sense.
- Best suited to
- Businesses with occasional but recurring legal questions.
- What it covers
- Discrete matters, with the benefit of counsel who already knows the business.
Project
Defined engagements
A specific piece of work with a beginning and an end: a template contract set, a compliance review, a transaction, or cleaning up entity records and governance documents that have fallen behind. Often how a relationship begins, and frequently what surfaces whether ongoing support would be worthwhile.
- Best suited to
- A defined need, or a first engagement before committing to more.
- Common examples
- Contract templates, governance cleanup, policy review, a transaction.
What This Covers
The general counsel work clients bring to the firm.
- 01
General Counsel
Businesses navigating growth, compliance, and risk management benefit from having trusted legal counsel available on an ongoing basis. General counsel services provide companies with a centralized legal resource to support day-to-day operations, long-term strategy, and crisis response. General counsel support covers employment law compliance, vendor contract review, corporate governance, intellectual property management, dispute resolution, and regulatory matters. Whether advising on expansion, reviewing internal policies, or assisting with mergers and acquisitions, legal counsel functions as a key member of the executive team. For startups, mid-size businesses, and scaling enterprises alike, outsourced general counsel services offer flexibility and expertise without the cost of full-time, in-house legal staff. With a trusted advisor on call, businesses gain confidence in their decisions and peace of mind that legal risks are being addressed proactively.
Typical Matters
General Counsel work is handled with structure, urgency, and commercial judgment.
01
Recurring contract review
02
Employment, vendor, and customer issues
03
Leadership decision support
04
Outside counsel coordination
Common Questions
General Counsel questions clients ask first.
What does outside general counsel actually do?
Handles the ongoing legal needs of a business that does not have in-house counsel: reviewing and negotiating contracts, advising on employment questions, responding to demands and disputes, keeping entity governance current, and triaging whatever comes up.
The defining feature is continuity. Because the same counsel handles matters over time, they know how the business works and can answer quickly, without being brought up to speed each time.
How is this different from hiring a firm for a specific matter?
Context and availability. Project-based representation means explaining the business each time and engaging only once something has become large enough to justify it.
An ongoing relationship means counsel already knows the company: how it is structured, what its key agreements say, and what has happened before. Questions get answered without a briefing first. It also means the smaller questions get asked at all, and those are usually the ones where a problem is still cheap to avoid.
Is my company too small for this?
Size matters less than volume of legal questions. A two-person company signing substantial customer agreements may need more support than a larger one with simpler operations.
The practical indicator is whether legal questions are coming up often enough that they are being deferred or decided without advice. When the answer is yes, some form of ongoing arrangement usually costs less than the problems it prevents.
How is it billed?
Commonly as a recurring monthly arrangement for companies with steady needs, or hourly for on-call and project work. The structure is agreed at the outset so cost is understood in advance.
A recurring arrangement has a benefit beyond predictability: it removes the reason people hesitate to make a quick call. That hesitation is what allows small issues to become large ones.
What if we need a specialist?
That work gets coordinated rather than forced into the general relationship. Litigation in another jurisdiction, a specialized regulatory proceeding, or a matter requiring particular technical expertise may call for specialist counsel.
The advantage of having ongoing counsel in that situation is having someone who knows the business helping select and manage the specialist, rather than the company managing it alone.
What are the first things you would look at?
Usually the entity and governance documents, the agreements that carry the most revenue and risk, and how the company classifies and contracts with the people who work for it.
Those three areas produce the majority of avoidable problems in small and mid-sized businesses. An initial review frequently surfaces items (an unfunded assignment of intellectual property, a lapsed filing, an indemnity clause nobody read) that are straightforward to correct before they matter.
Can you work with our existing accountant or other advisors?
Yes, and it generally produces better results. Tax, accounting, insurance, and legal questions overlap constantly: entity selection, compensation structure, and transaction planning all sit across those lines.
Coordinating rather than advising in isolation avoids the situation where each advisor optimizes for their own domain and the company ends up with a structure that suits none of them well.
Contact
Bring the facts. Leave with a plan.
Schedule a confidential consultation to assess the pressure points, legal options, and strongest next move.
Related Capabilities