You're Doing 100 Contracts a Year. Here's How to Handle It Without an In-House Lawyer.

There's a specific moment in a startup's life where legal becomes a bottleneck.

You've closed your Series A. Revenue is real. Deals are moving fast. And suddenly you're staring at a queue of contracts — NDAs, SaaS subscription agreements, reseller partnerships — that all need to go out or come back redlined before the quarter closes.

If you don't have a legal team, that queue doesn't shrink. It grows.

The Post-Series A Contract Surge

Before your A round, you might handle 10–20 contracts a year. After it, that number can hit 50, 80, even 100+ — especially if you're in a B2B space with enterprise customers, channel partners, or regulated buyers who send you their paper.

The contracts themselves get harder too:

• NDAs seem simple, but enterprise NDAs have teeth. Residuals clauses, broad definitions of confidential information, perpetual terms, and one-way obligations can all create real risk if you're not reading carefully.
• B2B SaaS agreements are where the real complexity lives. Liability caps, data processing obligations, SLA carveouts, IP ownership, audit rights, and indemnification language all need to align with how your product actually works — and what your insurance covers.
• Reseller and partner agreements introduce a new category of risk: channel conflict, territory restrictions, performance commitments, and IP licensing terms that can box you in as you scale.

None of these are one-size-fits-all. And all of them require someone who actually knows what they're looking at.

Why Hiring In-House Doesn't Pencil Out (Yet)

A general counsel in New York or San Francisco costs $250,000–$400,000 in total comp, plus benefits, equity, and management overhead. For a post-Series A company burning runway toward Series B, that's a heavy bet on a single hire who still won't cover everything you need.

Most companies at this stage need a generalist who can handle commercial contracts and employment and corporate governance and equity and compliance. That person — if they exist — is expensive and hard to find.

The math rarely works until you're well into Series B territory, and sometimes not until C.

What Fractional General Counsel Actually Solves

The fractional GC model isn't a compromise. For companies between $2M and $20M ARR, it's often the better answer — for a few reasons:

Speed without surprises. A good fractional GC builds a system around your contract workflow. Templates get drafted and approved once. Playbooks define your fallback positions. Review cycles shrink from weeks to days.

Predictable cost. Monthly retainers replace hourly billing. You know what legal costs every month, which makes budgeting and board reporting significantly cleaner.

Depth where it matters. If you're in B2B SaaS, you want counsel who's done hundreds of these agreements — not a generalist who's learning your business model while billing you $500/hour.

Scalability. As your volume grows, your legal infrastructure should grow with it — not break. A fractional GC builds the systems so that contract 87 isn't harder than contract 12.

The Contract Workflow We Build With You

When we bring on a post-Series A company at this stage, here's what the first 60 days typically look like:

1. Contract audit. We review your standard-form agreements, past deals, and any customer paper you've signed. We identify where your exposure lives.
2. Template buildout. We draft (or tighten) your standard NDA, SaaS subscription agreement, and any channel/partner templates. These become your defaults — negotiated once, used forever.
3. Playbook creation. For each template, we define what's acceptable, what's negotiable, and what's a dealbreaker. Your team can use this to move faster on low-complexity deals without legal involvement.
4. Review queue setup. We get embedded in how you work — Slack, email alias, project board — so contract requests have a clear path and a clear SLA.

From there, ongoing work is straightforward. Contracts come in, get reviewed, come back redlined with context, and move forward.

What "Fast Turnaround" Actually Means

We hear this requirement often, and it's worth being specific about what it means in practice.

Fast doesn't mean reckless. It means that the lawyer reviewing your contract understands your business, has already negotiated your fallback positions, and isn't starting from scratch every time.

For standard NDAs, that's often same-day. For a customer's 40-page MSA with custom data processing requirements, that's 24–72 hours depending on complexity. The goal is that legal is never the reason a deal slips.

A Note on Handling Inbound Paper

One thing that trips up a lot of post-Series A companies: customer-sent contracts.

Enterprise buyers often insist on their paper. That paper is drafted by their lawyers to protect their interests. It's not neutral. And if you don't redline it, you're signing terms that may conflict with your product capabilities, your insurance coverage, or your future financing.

Having a fractional GC means you have someone who reviews every piece of inbound paper before it gets signed — not just the contracts you draft yourself.

Is Flux the Right Fit?

We work best with companies that:

• Are post-seed or post-Series A, scaling toward a growth round
• Have meaningful commercial activity — recurring contracts, enterprise customers, channel relationships
• Don't have (and aren't ready to hire) a full-time in-house counsel
• Want legal embedded in how they work, not just available on request

If that sounds like your company, let's talk. The first call is 15 minutes — enough to figure out whether we're a fit and what a workflow would look like for your volume.