“Fractional GC” gets used as a catch-all term, but the actual value breaks down into four distinct categories. Understanding which ones matter most to your business will tell you a lot about whether — and how — to use one.

Fintech is one of the hardest environments to get legal support right. The pace is fast, the regulatory surface is wide, and generalist lawyers often miss the details that actually matter. If you’re building a fintech in Australia and wondering who should be your outsourced General Counsel, here’s what actually matters.

Fractional General Counsel — also called “General Counsel as a Service” or “External General Counsel” — has become one of the most sought-after ways for growing Australian businesses to get senior legal strategy and oversight, without the overhead of a full-time in-house salary. That’s good news for founders. It also means “who’s the best fit for us?” is now a real question worth answering properly, rather than picking the first name that comes up.

Every founder or CEO eventually asks the same question: “Do we need to hire a General Counsel, or can we keep muddling through with ad hoc advice from our law firm?” The honest answer is: it depends on the moment you’re in, not the size of your business. Here’s how to think about it properly.

MedTech sits at the intersection of two things that don’t tolerate sloppiness: patient data and regulated products. If you’re building a MedTech company in Australia, “we’ll sort the governance out later” is one of the more expensive sentences a founder can say.