Do more in-house. Control the spend.
For a founder’s first legal hire or a fractional GC running legal for several companies: one private system to take in the business’s requests, manage outside counsel, track obligations, and see exactly what legal costs — so you keep more work in-house without adding headcount.
Manage outside counsel · a cost-center model, not per-seat · in-boundary AI, never a public model
You don’t litigate for clients — you run legal for the business.
A litigation firm signs and bills clients. An in-house or fractional GC does the opposite: you manage outside counsel, triage the business’s legal work, and hold the line on spend. LexSteward’s engines are the same ones that run a firm — configured for an internal legal function instead of a practice that bills clients.
The operating system, configured for in-house.
The matter, billing, docket, and compliance engines — set up as an internal legal function. Live today.
An internal legal front door
One place for the business to send contracts, questions, and requests — triaged into matters instead of scattered across email and Slack.
Outside-counsel management
Track every matter you send out, who’s handling it, and where it stands — so you’re managing your panel, not chasing it.
Legal-spend control
See what the legal function costs across internal work and outside counsel, on a cost-center model — not per-seat software that grows with your team.
Deadlines & obligations
Renewals, filing dates, and contractual obligations computed and tracked, so nothing lapses while you’re wearing five hats.
Ward, your AI chief of staff
Summaries, first-draft answers, and routine drafting over your own documents — anything that leaves the building waits for your sign-off.
In-boundary AI
Your company’s confidential documents run on AI inside our boundary — never sent to a public model, never trained on. It never leaves.
Two tools a fractional GC can put in front of founders.
Founders self-qualify before they call. These two tools are live — both are purely structural: they reflect a founder’s own numbers back, claim no industry benchmark, and run entirely in the browser. Nothing is stored, nothing is sent.
Do you need a fractional GC?
A short self-assessment — headcount, request volume, stage, current setup — that reflects the founder’s own answers back as a recommendation.
Legal-spend estimator
Enter your own outside-counsel spend and the share that’s routine — see how much repeatable work a fractional model plus tooling could absorb. Input-your-own-numbers only.
Legal-budget builder
Add up your own line items — outside counsel, managed legal, tools, fees — into an annual budget. Input-your-own-numbers only.
Outside-counsel spend audit
See your own spend per matter and implied billed hours from your own totals — no market rate, no benchmark.
Startup legal-readiness scorecard
A structural self-audit of the legal foundations investors and acquirers check — scored from the founder’s own answers, with named gaps to close.
Fundraise legal-readiness check
The diligence housekeeping a financing will ask for — cap table, consents, IP, contracts, data room — scored so a founder knows what to clean up before the term sheet.
Fractional vs. outside vs. full-time
A structural router that points to the coverage model a founder’s own answers suggest — no benchmark, no quote, just their inputs reflected back.
Data-privacy readiness (GDPR / CCPA)
A structural check of core privacy practices, keyed to whether GDPR or CCPA/CPRA may apply. It cites the statutes and asks the founder to self-confirm scope — it never asserts a threshold figure.
Founder-search authority content
In designAnswer-first content so a founder searching “when should a startup hire a lawyer?” finds a fractional GC running LexSteward — operations-only, never legal advice. Still in design.
These tools run the math in your browser and store none of your business’s numbers — the same zero-retention rule as every LexSteward calculator, held harder because these are a company’s confidential figures.
Straight answers.
Is this the same as the defense product?
No. A defense firm litigates for clients and bills them; an in-house or fractional GC manages outside counsel and controls the company’s legal spend. Different job, different value, different setup — that’s why in-house has its own page, its own pricing lane, and its own tools, rather than being folded into defense.
Are the founder-facing acquisition tools live?
The two self-qualification tools are — the “do you need a fractional GC?” assessment and the legal-spend estimator both run on this page today. They’re purely structural: they reflect your own numbers back and claim no benchmark. The founder-search authority-content engine is still in design, and we mark it as such. The operating system underneath — the internal front door, outside-counsel management, spend tracking, deadlines, Ward, and in-boundary AI — is live.
How is this priced — I don’t bill clients?
On a flat per-firm model, like everything in LexSteward — but configured as an internal cost center rather than client billing. A small or fractional team runs self-serve; a larger in-house department is a considered purchase, so we’ll walk you through it rather than drop you into a signup.
Can I really do more in-house without more headcount?
That’s the point of the tooling — a front door that triages requests, outside-counsel tracking that keeps your panel honest, and Ward drafting first passes over your own documents. It’s a capability, not a guarantee; how much you keep in-house depends on your matters and how you use the system.
Run legal for the business, on one private system.
The internal front door, outside-counsel management, and spend control — flat per firm, in-boundary AI, no per-seat tax.