What you're really buying
A full-time in-house lawyer is a salary, employer's national insurance, pension, benefits, a notice period, and the recruitment cost of finding them, before they have answered a single question. Call it six figures all-in for a good one. And for that, you get one person, with one set of specialisms.
That last part is the bit people miss. Legal work isn't one skill. The person brilliant at your commercial contracts may be genuinely out of their depth on a shareholder dispute, an employment tribunal, or a cross-border deal. A single hire covers one seat at a table that needs several.
You don't have a legal problem that needs a headcount. You have a handful of very different legal problems that arrive at different times.
The pattern in most growing businesses
Legal need in a growing company is lumpy, not steady. It looks like this:
- Long quiet stretches where almost nothing needs a lawyer at all.
- Sudden spikes, a funding round, a big customer contract, a dispute, a key hire, where you need real depth, fast.
- A constant low hum of small questions that don't individually justify a phone call to an expensive firm, so they get ignored until one of them grows teeth.
A full-time hire is a flat cost laid over a spiky need. You pay for the quiet months to be ready for the busy ones, and you still only get one person's range when the spike hits.
The alternative: an outsourced legal function
The model that actually fits that shape is an outsourced legal function on a retainer. Senior legal support, available when the work is there, drawing on more than one specialism, without the fixed overhead in the gaps. In practice that means:
- A dedicated person who knows your business, so you're not re-explaining it every time.
- Access to the right expertise for the matter in front of you, not just the one lawyer you happened to hire.
- A fixed monthly fee you can actually budget, insurance-backed, with none of the employment liability.
- The ability to scale it up in a busy quarter and down in a quiet one.
Lower cost, broader expertise, no employment contract. The only thing you give up is a desk with a lawyer sitting at it, and most businesses don't actually need the desk.
When a real hire is right
To be fair to the in-house route, it earns its keep when legal genuinely runs hot every week, not every quarter, and when having someone physically embedded in the leadership team, in every meeting, is worth the premium. Large, legally-intensive businesses reach that point. Most growing companies reach for it years before they actually need it.
A useful test: if you can't tell me, off the top of your head, roughly what you spent on legal in the last three months, you almost certainly don't have the volume yet to justify a full-time salary.
Weighing up an in-house hire?
Silva's retainer gives growing businesses a dedicated, senior legal function on a fixed monthly fee, without the cost or commitment of an employed lawyer.