General Counsel, Total Flexibility

How It Works

How a "Fractional GC" can work for you

A Fractional General Counsel is a partner-level lawyer and senior business leader who works 1 - 3 days a week for their clients, providing exceptional, senior support and strategic guidance from Day 1, without the obligations or budget impact of a full time lawyer on staff.

My services work best for businesses (Seed to Series B, or SMEs) who have regular legal work, but don't yet have either the workload or the budget for a full time team and want to see real value for money.

I can build a legal function from scratch (including helping you hire your first full time lawyer when you are ready!) or step in to manage an existing team - I work however you need me to and I have a wide range of experience across corporate, commercial, employment, compliance and data protection matters - the only things I really outsource are patent applications and regulatory work - so you are getting 3 - 4 specialist lawyers for the price of 1!

By committing to my services for 6 - 18 months, you secure yourself a day rate which is a fraction of my standard hourly fees, a fraction of a law firm's fees and crucially, because I have done this so many times before, 1 day of my time is the equivalent of 2 - 3 days of most lawyers' time, so you get real value for money.

Expertise, flexibility, and value.

About Me.

My career has ranged from intense $500m+ acquisitions at Jones Day and White & Case, advising 600 startups via my own consultancy in Singapore, to working as in-house General Counsel for incredible British scale-ups like Omnipresent.

I love variety, I love learning new things and most of all I love the feeling of making an impact. That is why I pride myself on working faster and smarter than most lawyers out there and have according to one former colleague have "the strongest bias to action of anyone I have ever met" (Thanks Uri!)

My priority will always be finding a way to make your goals a reality - and throughout my career have been told I am the most commercial and pragmatic lawyer my clients and colleagues have ever dealt with. You will never hear a no from me, only a "we can't do it like that ... but let's find a way".

Outside work I am a passionate scuba diver and spent a year living on Koh Tao in Thailand working as a PADI Divemaster. I am terrible golfer, and an obsessive reader (currently reading: Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin). After decades in big cities I am rediscovering the joy of the wild and have returned home to the Isle of Wight, and live 5 minutes from the beach, with my husband, 3 daughters and 2 dogs.

Experience

Sole Counsel / First Counsel

I have frequently been the first lawyer in a business or the only lawyer in a business for the first 6-12 months. That means I have an existing playbook on how to build a successful and highly efficient legal function from the ground up, creating an L&D library, template database and Legal Ops function that can be as automated as you choose. It also means I am happy to do the simple junior work as well as the glamorous cross border deals and investment negotiations!

Building & Managing Teams

At Omnipresent I built the Legal function from just me to a high functioning team of 25 over 2 years, working fully remote across South and North America, Europe and Asia. I love mentoring junior lawyers and consider myself pretty good at it, but don't ask me - just check out the testimonials from my former teams!

Seed, Series A and Series B

While running my own consultancy I supported over 500 businesses through their early funding rounds, from ideation through Seed, SAFEs, KISSes and (for 3 exceptional businesses) Series A and Series B. Since then I have led 3 further businesses into their Series A as their General Counsel, and one of those on to a $120m Series B!

Employment

At Omnipresent I advised on employment law matters across 150 different countries. Contract drafting, termination, parental leave, collective bargaining agreements, global mobility and the legal status of employers of record.

Data Protection

I advised multiple clients on the implementation of the GDPR in 2018, including TradeGecko a successful startup I supported through their Seed to Series A growth. Since then I have set up multiple data protection suites with the businesses I have worked in, developing all the policies, agreements and template clauses, but also working in partnership with our engineering and product teams to ensure we are building products which are compliant by design, and can scale effectively with minimal manual intervention.