Outside General Counsel

Practical Advisement For Companies Ready for the Next Stage

When your company is growing, legal questions show up in customer contracts, vendor relationships, AI use, employee questions, compliance requests, leadership meetings, sales conversations, and decisions that need practical answers.

Extended Counsel provides outside general counsel services for companies that need experienced legal support before adding a full-time in-house lawyer. The firm works with businesses that need legal guidance built around real operations.

When Legal Starts Taking Up Leadership Time

In many growing companies, legal work starts informally. A founder reviews the customer agreement. The COO answers the vendor question. The CFO weighs in on risk. Sales asks leadership what terms they can accept. Someone makes the call, and the business keeps going. That can work for a while.

But as contract volume increases, customer requirements get more specific, AI and data questions become more common, and internal teams need faster answers, legal decisions can start taking up too much leadership time.

Outside general counsel gives your company a clearer place for those questions to go. Extended Counsel helps leadership and business teams handle recurring legal issues with more structure, more consistency, and less guesswork.

Legal Support That Fits Into the Business

Outside general counsel can help make legal part of the way your company works.

That may include reviewing contracts, advising leadership, building approval workflows, creating internal policies, identifying risk areas, coordinating with specialist counsel, supporting business teams, and helping your company decide what needs attention now versus what can be planned for later.

That means clearer escalation points, more consistent decisions, and legal support that helps the business keep moving.

Heather Asher brings the perspective of a former General Counsel and Corporate Secretary who has worked directly with CEOs, CFOs, sales teams, operators, boards, and legal departments. That experience matters because legal advice has to work inside the company, across the teams that actually use it.

What Outside General Counsel Can Help With

Extended Counsel can support your company across the legal issues that tend to follow growth, including:

• Commercial contracts, customer agreements, vendor contracts, NDAs, professional services agreements, and recurring contract questions.
• Legal frameworks, including templates, checklists, playbooks, workflows, policies, and practical tools your team can use again.
• AI governance, including internal policies, customer questions, data use concerns, vendor risk, and responsible AI practices.
• Compliance and risk assessment, including practical issue-spotting, prioritization, and planning based on your company’s size, industry, budget, and operations.
• Corporate training for leadership, sales, HR, finance, operations, and other teams that need to understand how legal issues show up in their work.
• Outside counsel coordination when your company needs a specialist for litigation, tax, IP filings, securities, healthcare, or another area outside Extended Counsel’s scope.

Before You Hire In-House Counsel

Many companies reach a point where they need ongoing legal judgment, but not a full-time legal department.

Outside general counsel can help fill that gap. Your company can get senior legal support, start building better systems, and understand what kind of legal function you may need as the business grows.

For some companies, this becomes a long-term outside counsel relationship. For others, it helps prepare the business for a future in-house hire by putting contract processes, policies, workflows, and risk priorities in place before that person arrives.

Support for In-House Legal Teams

Extended Counsel can also support companies that already have in-house counsel.

For solo general counsel or small legal departments, Heather can step in as an extension of the team for overflow contracts, policy projects, legal operations support, business-team questions, outside counsel coordination, or work that needs senior-level judgment without adding permanent headcount.

Because Heather has worked in-house, she understands when to handle an issue directly, when to pull internal counsel back in, and how to work with business teams in a way that supports both the legal function and the company’s broader goals.

A More Efficient Legal Model for Your Business

Extended Counsel is built around direct access to experienced business counsel.

The work is structured around clear communication, practical next steps, and the right level of support for the issue in front of you. Sometimes that means a focused project. Sometimes it means ongoing outside general counsel. We work within the scope of your needs. 

Start Working With Outside General Counsel

If legal questions are reaching leadership, contracts are becoming more frequent, or your company needs a more consistent way to handle risk, Extended Counsel can help you build the right legal support model for where your business is now. Learn more about how Extended Counsel supports growing companies on our homepage.