How Cohere keeps a high-growth legal team staffed through every surge

Cohere’s legal function sits next to a product and go-to-market motion that moves quickly. In a busy quarter, that means more than one pressure at once: parental leaves on the team, commercial and vendor work that still needs senior judgment, and specialist questions that cannot wait for a six-month search.

The brief to Goodlawyer was capacity with context: lawyers who could join Slack, learn the playbooks, and keep work moving alongside the in-house team rather than handing matters out to a firm that would need weeks of ramp.

Goodlawyer embedded Fractional InHouse™ lawyers across the workstreams that were under the most strain: commercial and vendor support, privacy-adjacent reviews, and employment coverage when the team needed depth during leaves.

Each fractional joined the same channels and cadences as the rest of legal. From the business’s point of view it looked like one function with more hands, not a stack of disconnected contractor relationships.

Scopes are tied to real workstreams with a clear definition of done. Hours flex when a launch, financing, or leave cycle spikes, and ease when the pipeline cools, without reopening procurement every time capacity needs to move.

A Goodlawyer engagement lead sits across the mandate so new specialists can be spun up in a sprint when a new workstream appears, instead of asking Cohere to run another full search.

The team kept commercial and specialist work moving through the busiest stretches of the year. Parental leave coverage held without dropping the ball on day-to-day counsel, and leadership could stay focused on the calls only they could make.

The lasting unlock was optionality: Cohere can add senior capacity when the quarter demands it, then right-size when the surge passes, without rebuilding the legal org from scratch each time.