The Value Of Outside General Counsel

Using a smaller but highly experienced firm to serve as outside general counsel can provide substantial benefits when compared to the alternatives:

Compared to Retaining a Large Law Firm. Retaining an outside general counsel offers many of the benefits associated with hiring a dedicated in-house general counsel. An experienced attorney will work closely with management on an ongoing basis to understand the business and identify and resolve potential legal issues. When those issues require expertise in a specialty, such as intellectual property, patent, tax, or labor & employment law, or litigation, we will, if the client requests, coordinate the selection of a specialist and provide oversight to help ensure both the quality and cost-effectiveness of the services rendered. We also can work with specialists with whom the client has worked and prefers to use. The model can be more compelling than hiring a large law firm for a number of reasons:

Accessibility - A general counsel typically is more available to help management understand the legal implications of their strategic and operational challenges.
Insight - A general counsel who attends board meetings and is intimately familiar with a company's business can be significantly more effective in anticipating legal obstacles on the horizon. Being able to identify and take action on an issue early can result in much improved outcomes, thereby avoiding unnecessary legal work and cost for the client.
Incentive alignment - A large firm, whose revenue is almost exclusively tied to billable hours, has less incentive to take preventative measures to shield a client from substantial hourly billings. The disconnect of incentives can be especially problematic when it comes to deciding whether or not to litigate, and when the client requires highly specialized legal expertise, a large firm will always have a strong financial incentive to have the work done by someone among its own ranks. A general counsel, by contrast, is focused solely on retaining the best resources to produce the best outcome for the client.
Cost - Large law-firms tend to have high overhead per lawyer compared to Morton PLLC. When the services are within our areas of expertise, we usually can provide the same legal services at a significantly lower rate and lower total cost. If we are not confident that a project can be handled more economically internally, we often seek estimates from specialists for the entire project to assure the most efficient solution is achieved for the client.

Compared to Employing Appropriate In-House General Counsel. While there are benefits associated with having an in-house general counsel, retaining outside general counsel can offer many or all of these advantages:

Affordability - The cost of the salary and benefits for a properly qualified in-house general counsel can be prohibitively expensive for many publicly-traded corporations and most venture-funded and other privately-held companies.
Flexibility - The outside general counsel model enables a business to enjoy many of the same benefits as with an experienced in-house general counsel, but it offers a greater degree of flexibility with regard to expense and level of service. In effect, the client is not “locked in” to the internal resource as a starting point.
Experience - In many cases, outside general counsel will have far more experience and a broader knowledge of the law than the in-house attorneys a business would be able to afford.

Morton PLLC is comprised of three attorneys. The firm's principal, Steve Morton has thirty years of legal experience working with clients in a broad spectrum of industries at different stages of their development. Both Lisa Davis, who has ten years' experience, and Ariana Held, who has over eight years’ experience, have worked extensively in mergers & acquisitions and corporate finance, which entail a high degree of "quarterbacking" and coordination of attorneys in other specialized fields.