A team of tech transactions lawyers, including a former CLO, that scales up with each sales cycle and back down when it ends.
At a Glance
- Company: High-growth AI company
- Team: A sole General Counsel
- The work: Contracting and tech transactions, concentrated in end-of-quarter sales cycles
- Engagement: A flexible team of experienced tech transactions lawyers, including a former CLO, scaling with demand
- Outcome: Fast turnaround maintained for the business, improved internal client satisfaction, and no permanent hires tied to cyclical demand
The Quarter-End Squeeze
The sole General Counsel of a high-growth AI company was carrying the full weight of the company’s contracting and tech transactions work. In an ordinary week that was demanding. At the end of a quarter, when the sales team pushed to close, it became something else entirely.
The volume of work arrived in a wave on the desk of the one lawyer in the building. Every deal that needed papering pulled her further into high-volume transactional work and further away from the strategic priorities a GC is actually hired to own — the work only she could do, deferred quarter after quarter in favor of the work that couldn’t wait.
Why the Usual Options Didn’t Fit
Rather than total volume, the issue stemmed from the work’s pattern: predictable, characterized by sharp peaks, and flat otherwise.
- Hire a second lawyer. Staffing for the peak means paying for that capacity in the quiet weeks too. Staffing for the average means the peak still breaks. Neither version of the hire matches a demand curve that spikes four times a year.
- Send it to a firm. Outside counsel can absorb volume, but sales cycles run on speed. Routing routine commercial contracts out and back adds a handoff at the exact moment the business needs turnaround measured in hours, and the rates don’t reflect the routine nature of most of the work.
- Handle it in-house. Internal bandwidth was nonexistent. As the sole attorney on the team, any extra work fell entirely on her personal time.
The business required dynamic support directly aligned with its cyclical needs, fully available during quarter-end pushes, yet inactive during regular periods.
A Team That Scales With the Sales Cycle
The company partnered with Priori to build a flexible team of experienced tech transactions lawyers, including a former Chief Legal Officer. The team could step in during peak periods and scale back down when the cycle slowed.
Seniority mattered here as much as capacity. These weren’t lawyers who needed the GC to review every redline — having sat in the CLO seat herself, the former CLO on the team understood which positions required firm negotiation and which could be conceded to close, creating operational leverage rather than an added management burden. For a solo General Counsel, that’s the distinction that matters: help you can hand work to, not help you have to oversee.
Because the same lawyers returned cycle after cycle, they came back already knowing the company’s paper, its positions, and its risk tolerance. Each quarter started further along than the last.
Strategic Work, Back on the Calendar
With the quarter-end surge covered, the GC could refocus on the strategic initiatives that had been getting pushed aside — the work a company hires a General Counsel to do, rather than the work a General Counsel ends up doing when there’s no one else.
Turnaround times stayed fast through the peak, which is what the sales team cares about, and internal client satisfaction improved. Legal stopped being the step where deals slowed down.
And the company avoided taking on permanent headcount sized to a demand curve that only spikes a few times a year. Capacity showed up when the quarter demanded it and receded when it didn’t, matching the cost to the work rather than to the calendar.
Facing a similar gap?
If your legal team’s workload arrives in waves — quarter-end closes, funding rounds, product launches — capacity that scales with the cycle may fit better than a permanent hire sized to the peak or the average.
