How to hire a General Counsel

How do you know if a GC fits the role you need, where do you find the top candidates, and what are the general counsel interview questions you should be asking? We answer all this (and more) detailed guide.

When should I hire a General Counsel?

You often need to hire a GC when the legal work becomes too difficult (and expensive) to manage alongside other responsibilities or too complicated to handle without the right expertise.

Most often, this is in a growth stage where a businesses risk appetite is at its highest. In the earlier stages of a business, legal work sits with the person responsible for operations at the business.

As the business scales, so does the work these employees do and the risks the business has to take. At this stage it may become apparent that the business needs to hire a legal professional to handle incoming legal requests, alongside building legal infrastructure that will protect it against risk as it grows.

Other points that indicate the need for in-house resource include:

• Complexity of legal work. If your business operates in a high-regulated industry, like finance or healthcare, you may consider hiring an in-house lawyer sooner rather than later, to handle regulatory and compliance work.

• Variety of legal work. If your business is expanding into other territories, planning a funding round or M&A, or launching new products and services, then you may want to consider hiring an in-house lawyer to offer guidance on these huge projects.

• Cost of outsourcing legal work. If you review your legal spend management, you’ll likely reach a point where hiring a lawyer in-house is more beneficial than outsourcing that work to external counsel.
  

Is a General Counsel the right role for your team?

This depends on the kind of work your General Counsel will be doing.

If you’re looking for a lawyer to manage low-value contracts and oversee simple contract negotiations, but nothing else, then a GC will be overqualified for the role. It might be a different in-house legal job title you're hiring for.

Mishiring may result in disengagement with the work, and a higher chance they’ll end up leaving after a short period of time. 

To ensure you’re hiring the most suitable person for the job, make sure you have answers to the following questions:

• What kind of work will that hire be doing? Will they be doing administrative work, or acting as a strategic partner to the business?
   
• What skills and capabilities do you consider a must-have for your legal hire, as opposed to a ‘nice-to-have’?
  
  
• What kind of expertise do you need? Are there any major projects or milestones coming up over the next few years that require certain legal skills?
  
  
• How do you anticipate the legal team growing over the next few years? Do you want to hire someone who can grow that team, and manage direct reports?
  
  
• If you’re looking to hire someone more junior, who will manage and train them?

This can help you identify the right level of expertise for your business.

Full-time GC vs fractional GC vs GC plus legal ops

Hiring isn't always a binary "GC or no GC" decision.

Three models are common at scaling companies, and the right one depends on volume and complexity of legal work, not just company size:

• Full-time GC. Makes sense once legal work is a daily, varied stream that needs someone embedded in leadership decisions, not just responding to requests as they land.
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• Fractional or interim GC. A part-time or contract GC, often engaged for a few days a month, is a common middle step for companies that need senior legal judgment on tap (a funding round, an M&A process, a first big regulatory push) but don't yet have enough volume to justify a full-time senior salary. It's also a sensible bridge while you run a proper search for a permanent hire. More on fractional GCs here.
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• GC plus legal ops or a paralegal. As the GC's remit grows, a lot of the volume they're absorbing is process rather than judgment: contract admin, intake triage, chasing signatures. Pairing a GC with a legal ops hire (or a CLM platform that automates the repetitive parts) often extends a single GC's capacity further than adding a second lawyer would.

If you're not sure which model fits, it's worth mapping out the actual legal workload first, ideally by volume and complexity rather than headcount, before deciding what kind of hire (or hires) will clear it.

How has AI changed the General Counsel role?

The GC brief has broadened significantly since AI moved from experimentation into everyday operational use.

In most organizations today, the General Counsel is the executive who ends up owning AI governance: setting acceptable use policies, weighing in on liability exposure, and making sure the business can explain how its AI systems are actually controlled, not just how they're supposed to work on paper.

None of this requires a GC to be a technologist, but it does mean they need to be comfortable enough in the detail to challenge assumptions made by engineering and data teams, rather than rubber-stamping or merely rejecting them.

That shift shows up directly in job descriptions. Where GC postings once led with regulatory and compliance experience, most now also ask for:

1. Ownership of governance and accountability frameworks that hold up under scrutiny, not just policies that exist on paper.

2. Working fluency in technology, data and AI risk — enough to sit credibly in conversations about vendor selection, model governance and cross-border data flows, without needing to be the most technical person in the room.

3. Comfort using AI tools day-to-day, since legal teams are under real pressure to run more efficiently themselves. Industry research on legal tech adoption has found that close to half of corporate legal departments now use legal technology frequently or constantly, up sharply from the year before, with generative AI adoption driving most of that growth.

4. Strong executive and board-level communication, since hiring panels increasingly test judgment and risk framing through scenario-based discussions rather than pure legal-technical questions.

For hiring teams, the practical takeaway is to write (and interview against) a job description that reflects this broader remit, rather than a traditional compliance-and-litigation brief with "AI awareness" bolted on as an afterthought.

A candidate who's led AI governance or legal ops change elsewhere is often a stronger signal than years of experience alone.

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Where to hire a General Counsel

You have three main options when choosing how to approach hiring a general counsel. 

1. Use your network

You can turn to law firms that you've worked with in the past for candidates. If you're at a startup that until that point, has been using a law firm, you could ask them for recommendations based on similar clients of theirs. 

This could be an effective way to source top talent with relevant experience. You can also post the job on LinkedIn, though the success of this approach will depend on the size and reach of your network. 

2. Find a community

Reaching out to a community specifically for GCs and senior lawyers can be useful. One example is Juro’s community of 1,600+ in-house lawyers.

Having access to closed-door events, exclusive content, perks and a curated General Counsel jobs board in this area may help you narrow your search:

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3. Use a specialist recruiter

The downside to this is that there aren’t that many specialist recruiters to choose from, especially when you’re looking at specific roles, so your options may be limited. But this can be an effective way to outsource the heavy lifting of sourcing talent.

How much does it cost to hire a General Counsel?

Hiring a general counsel is not cheap, and the number varies a lot by company stage, not just country.

According to Salary.com, the base salary for a General Counsel in the US is an average of $365,000, but that figure blends a wide range.

Early-stage startup GCs often earn closer to $200,000-$350,000 in base pay, topped up with equity that can become significant if the company succeeds, while GCs at large public companies can see total compensation stretch well into seven figures once bonus and equity are included.

In the UK, the average salary for a General Counsel is £158,615, according to Glassdoor's salary benchmarks, with London GCs commanding a premium at closer to £190,000, and salaries generally running higher for candidates who've handled M&A, funding rounds or multi-jurisdiction regulatory work.

For a full rundown of the average general counsel pay across several countries, and by company stage, check out this page.

If a full-time hire at these levels isn't justified yet, it's worth weighing that cost against a fractional GC or senior legal counsel hire instead.

How to assess a General Counsel’s skills in an interview

It’s important to assess both hard and soft skills in the interview process, particularly given the breadth of tasks that cross a General Counsel's desk.

Assessing hard skills

An effective way to do this is through written tasks. For example, you could set your GC the task of redlining part of your Master Services Agreement (MSA) and assess based on their approach to the task; are they highlighting every minor detail? Or are they prioritising important points over nitpicking? Do they have strong attention to detail? Or are they haphazard in their redlining process?

When hiring the first GC at Juro, Richard Mabey set this task. He says: “We wanted to see if that candidate could prioritise the most significant points - are they redlining contracts strategically, or are they striking everything out?”

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Being able to identify a candidate's strengths and weaknesses in a contract markup can be an effective indicator of how they work, and if they’d work well in your business. You can ask your current external counsel to help with the process of assessing quality of work and interviewing. ‍

Evaluating soft skills

Values interviews can be really useful when assessing soft skills. These are usually conversations between the candidate and other colleagues in the business, outside of the team the candidate will be joining. A General Counsel, for example, would speak with colleagues outside of legal.

These interviews allow employers to assess how well the candidate works with others, which is super important – there’s no point being the most talented lawyer in the business if you’re difficult to work with!

Another effective way to measure soft skills is to set a presentation task, like working through a 90 day plan template, or creating a skeleton legal playbook. This will help the business assess the candidate’s clarity, communication skills and interpersonal skills. 

How do you know which General Counsel to hire?

There are several factors that determine whether a General Counsel is the right fit for your business, such as growth mindset, experience, collaborative nature and value-add. 

• Growth mindset: in-house lawyers need to balance risk with growth and an inability to do so will slow the business down. Hire someone who is adaptable and ready for the unique challenges of working at a scaling company.
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• Experience: similar to the above, you can set yourself up for success by interviewing and assessing candidates with relevant experience. Someone who only has experience as a lawyer at a Magic Circle firm might not be the right fit for an in-house role at a venture capital backed startup.
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• Collaborative nature: in-house lawyers are strategic advisors to the wider business and enablers of growth. This requires being able to collaborate with the wider business and manage requests coming from all sides of the company. A collaborative nature is a must-have. In order to succeed, legal can’t live in a silo, detached from the rest of the business.
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• Value-fit: does the candidate align with your company values? Do they fit your company culture, but more importantly, can they add to it and influence it? Being able to work well with others and act as a representative of the business is key

How do you define success in the General Counsel’s role?

‍Establishing a 90-day plan with quantifiable outcomes can help set the General Counsel up for success and provide accountability.

Being able to attribute metrics to the role and work in a data-driven way is also a good sign of a successful General Counsel; what are the contract turnaround times for commercial teams, for example? How many legal issues or queries were resolved in a month? What is the internal NPS of the legal team?

This removes the subjectivity and allows colleagues to objectively measure success of the legal function, which is really important.

In fact, the earlier you can define and relay success to prospective GCs, the better. We often see these key objectives show up in job descriptions for General Counsel hires, for example:

• Preparing for investment events: "Strengthen investor and event readiness, ensuring documentation, commercial contracts, and corporate housekeeping are well positioned for future strategic opportunities"
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• Building out legal function: "Lead and shape the legal function, managing a team of counsels and continuing to develop the right operating model"
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• Support international expansion: "Lead on the legal aspects of continued international expansion, including new entity set-up, employment and regulatory considerations, and local law advice coordination across new jurisdictions"
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• Develop contract playbooks: "Create standardized contract templates and contract playbook to improve speed, consistency, and quality of contracting across the company"

Hiring a General Counsel to build and scale the legal function is an exciting stage of a company’s life. By understanding what you need from a legal leader, what they can offer, and how to measure success, you can ensure the GC hits the ground running from day one, and delivers value to the wider business. We hope this guide helps!