Most family business owners don’t find out they needed a lawyer until after the contract is signed. Or after the employee files a claim. Or after the partnership agreement they treated as a handshake turns into a dispute.

A fractional general counsel exists to change that math.

What “fractional” actually means

A fractional general counsel is a business attorney who works with your company on a part-time or ongoing basis — embedded in your operations, not sitting on the sidelines waiting for you to call with a problem.

Here’s the reality: a full-time in-house general counsel costs $200,000–$350,000 a year before you factor in benefits and overhead. That’s not realistic for most family-owned businesses. But the legal exposure those businesses carry is just as real as what any larger company faces.

Fractional counsel closes that gap. You get the same quality of legal thinking — strategic, proactive, and rooted in your specific business — at a cost that makes sense for where you are.

What a fractional GC does that your “call when it breaks” attorney doesn’t

Most business owners are familiar with one version of legal help: you call when something goes wrong, get billed to fix it, and don’t talk again until the next fire.

A fractional GC operates from the other direction. They learn your business first — your contracts, your vendors, your partners, your risk profile. When a new deal or a new problem shows up, they’re not starting from scratch. They already know what matters to you and what to look for.

In practice, that means contracts get reviewed before you sign them. Business decisions get pressure-tested for legal exposure before you commit. Employment questions, ownership issues, vendor negotiations — you have someone who knows the context, not just the statute.

For a family-owned business, this is particularly valuable. The legal issues that end up costing the most — poorly structured operating agreements, partner arrangements that seemed fine until they weren’t, contracts that favored the other side — almost never announce themselves early. A fractional GC is how you catch them before they matter.

Who it’s actually right for

Not every business needs ongoing legal counsel. If your operations are simple and your contracts are few, a transactional attorney you call occasionally may be enough.

But if you’re growing — adding employees, signing larger contracts, bringing in partners, or thinking about succession — your legal exposure grows with you. A fractional GC is built for the point where “we can’t afford in-house counsel” and “we can’t afford not to have it” start to overlap.

That’s where most family-owned businesses in Chicago spend a long time.

How Burhanuddin Law approaches it

Fariz M. Burhanuddin founded this firm specifically for family-owned and closely held businesses in the Chicago area. Not large corporations. Not one-time clients. Business owners who are still in the building, still making the decisions, and still carrying the personal risk.

The fractional GC model fits because it’s the version of legal counsel that’s actually useful for that profile — embedded in your business, available on an ongoing basis, and built around your goals rather than around whatever you thought to ask about last.

If you’ve been operating without consistent legal support, or your current approach is more reactive than you’d like, a conversation is a reasonable first step.