I've spent the last three years building a fractional legal practice from inside the market — first as a buyer of fractional counsel when I was a GC, then as a fractional GC myself, and now building the infrastructure for other lawyers to do the same. The pattern is the same every time. The lawyers who would be excellent at independent work do not become independent. The reason is structural, and most of them haven't seen it clearly enough to fix it.
Here's the structural problem. The skills that make someone a good senior lawyer — pattern recognition on risk, conservatism on novel positions, instinct to slow down where others rush — are the same skills that make them risk-averse about their own career. The trait is professionally adaptive and personally limiting. Lawyers who would close a deal that mattered for their company in 48 hours will spend 18 months thinking about whether to leave the firm.
And when they finally do think about it, they think about it wrong. They model the move as binary: one day you're a partner or in-house counsel with predictable income, the next you're a sole trader with no clients, no inbound, and a marketing problem. Almost no one actually makes that jump. The few who do tend to be either unusually self-employed-curious (rare among lawyers) or pushed by circumstance (redundancy, partnership disappointment, life event). The vast middle — the lawyers who would be excellent fractional counsels but won't take a binary leap — stay put.
The honest fix.
Going independent is not actually a binary decision. The lawyers who make the transition cleanly are the ones who treat it as a sequence. Three steps, each with bounded downside.
Step one — ask your current employer to switch you to a contractor.
This is the move most lawyers don't see. Your existing employer — whether a firm or an in-house team — has a relationship with you, knows your work, and depends on your coverage of a specific scope. You are proposing a switch in form, not in substance. You will do the same work you do today, on the same matters, at the same quality. You will simply be invoicing for it rather than being on payroll.
The proposition is genuinely good for the employer. They pay only for hours worked, which usually nets cheaper than fully-loaded employment cost once you factor in National Insurance, pension, benefits, and the ~20–30% overhead on a senior salary. They keep the lawyer who already knows the business, with no recruitment gap. They get predictable invoicing instead of fixed payroll. In 2025 and 2026, with UK in-house hiring under sustained EBITDA pressure [1], the conversation lands more often than lawyers expect.
You need to frame it correctly. The frame is continuity, not autonomy. You are not asking for permission to leave; you are proposing a more flexible commercial arrangement that protects their coverage. Bring numbers — your fully-loaded cost today versus a credible contractor rate. Bring scope — exactly what work you'll cover and the rough hours per month. Bring a transition plan — how the handover of any work outside scope will be handled.
Some employers will say no. That's information, and it costs you nothing. Most won't.
Step two — keep them as your anchor client.
This is the part lawyers underweight. If your existing employer becomes your first contractor client, you've replaced your salary with contractor income before you've changed any other variable. Your financial risk is essentially zero. You've moved from one employer to one client doing the same work, with a slightly different invoicing arrangement and a meaningfully better unit economics for you.
The anchor matters because it sets your baseline. Fractional lawyers without an anchor client have to build a book of business from cold while their personal runway burns. Lawyers with an anchor have a known monthly revenue floor, which means they can be selective about which next clients to take, and they can absorb the natural lumpiness of project-based work without panic.
Treat the anchor like an anchor. Don't cannibalise it. Don't undersell it for the leverage you think the new clients give you. The anchor is the thing that lets the rest of the strategy work.
Step three — add clients on top, one at a time.
Once the anchor is stable, you add. You don't need many. Most fractional GCs I know operate with two to four clients at any time, billing 20 to 40 hours per week split across them. The arithmetic is forgiving. A senior fractional counsel in the UK typically charges between £200 and £400 per hour. At a £300 blended realised rate, working 29% of full-time capacity (about 12 hours per week), you generate around £149,000 a year. At full-time utilisation, that's £518,000 in annual throughput [2]. Most lawyers find that the floor is meaningfully higher than what they were earning in-house — even before they fully load it.
Where do those clients come from? Three sources, in roughly equal proportion. Existing network — former colleagues, founders you've worked with, GCs you've supported. Referrals from the anchor — they will recommend you, particularly to companies in their network who can't justify a full GC. And platforms that route demand to you — which is the part Correm exists to solve.
What's actually stopping you.
If you're a senior lawyer reading this and thinking "yes, but…", I'd put money on the "but" being one of these four. Each is real. None is fatal.
Infrastructure. Independent practice means matter management, billing, conflict checks, precedents, professional indemnity, and the rest of the firm scaffolding that you currently take for granted. Building this from scratch is genuinely a lot of work and, until recently, almost no one had a clean answer for it. This is the gap Correm and a handful of others now fill — the operating system for independent practice. The infrastructure problem is solved if you choose to solve it.
Business development. Lawyers don't like pitching. It feels like the antithesis of being a senior professional, and the lawyers who are best at the work are often the worst at marketing it. The right response to this is not to get better at pitching; it's to set up so you don't have to. The anchor client strategy means you don't pitch for your first client. Platforms route inbound demand to you so you don't pitch for the next few. Referrals from happy clients carry you the rest of the way. The pitching problem is mostly an artefact of having to find clients cold, which the staged transition avoids.
Identity. "Senior counsel at X" carries weight. "Independent lawyer" sounds smaller, even though the work might be the same or more interesting. This is the hardest one to address directly because it's pre-rational. It tends to dissolve about six months after the move, when you realise that clients hire you for your judgment, not your letterhead. But it's worth being honest with yourself that it's part of what's holding you. Most senior lawyers have spent 15+ years inside an institutional identity. You will feel exposed for a while.
The lawyer in your head. Every senior lawyer has a model of "the kind of person who does this" — and for many, that model isn't them. The model is wrong. The kind of person who runs an independent practice well is the kind of person who currently runs a competent in-house function or a focused practice group. The disposition is identical. The packaging is just different.
The arithmetic argument.
I keep coming back to numbers because numbers are clarifying. Here are three that should change the conversation.
The first is your fully-loaded cost to your employer today. A senior in-house lawyer on a £180,000 salary costs the employer £210,000 to £240,000 once you add National Insurance, pension, benefits and the share of overhead allocated to the role. That £210,000 to £240,000 is the budget your employer already spends on you. You are proposing to deliver the same work at a number broadly equal to or below it, while taking on the employment-side risk yourself in exchange for the upside on additional clients.
The second is the upside on those additional clients. At £300 per hour, ten additional billable hours per week across one or two extra clients is £150,000 to £160,000 in annual additional revenue. That's the order of magnitude of upside that the anchor-plus-add strategy unlocks, before you've changed your existing arrangement at all.
The third is the regret-minimisation arithmetic. The downside of doing this is bounded: if you can't make the anchor conversion work, you've cost yourself a difficult conversation. If the anchor works but you can't find additional clients, you're still earning at-or-above your previous income at lower personal cost. If everything works, you're earning meaningfully more in a model that compounds.
What to do next.
If you're thinking about this seriously, three concrete actions.
First, write down the conversation you'd have with your current employer about a contractor switch. Not the abstract conversation — the actual conversation, with the actual person, including the numbers and the scope. Most lawyers find that drafting it makes it obvious whether the conversation is winnable. About 70% of the time, in my experience, it is.
Second, count your latent clients. Make a list of every founder, GC, and operator in your network who has either complained about their current legal support or paid £20k+ to a firm in the last year for something you could have handled in half the time. That list is your pipeline. You don't have to call any of them today. You just need to know they exist.
Third, work out the infrastructure question separately from the will-I-do-this question. The decision tree is cleaner when the two are separated. If the infrastructure problem is solved (and these days it largely is), then the only remaining question is whether the staged transition is right for you. Make it that simple, then decide.
The independence wave that the legal profession is going through is real, and it's accelerating. The people who go through it deliberately, with a sequence rather than a leap, end up with practices that are more durable, more interesting, and more lucrative than what they left behind. The skills are there. The math is there. The only thing missing is the permission to see it as a sequence.
Give yourself that permission. Then go talk to your boss.
Frequently asked.
What's the safest way for a senior lawyer to go independent?
The safest route is staged, not binary. Ask your current employer to convert your role to a contractor arrangement on the work you already do. Keep them as an anchor client at a similar overall economic value to your salary. Add one or two additional clients on top, billed independently. You replace employment income with contractor income before you ever reduce your hours with the anchor — so the financial risk is bounded throughout.
How much can a fractional general counsel earn in the UK?
A senior fractional general counsel in the UK typically charges between £200 and £400 per hour, with the realised blended rate around £300. At 29% utilisation, that produces around £149,000 in annual revenue. At full utilisation, the same hourly rate implies around £518,000 in annual throughput. Most lawyers operate between 20 and 40 billable hours per week split across two to four clients.
Will my employer agree to switch me from employee to contractor?
More employers agree to this than lawyers expect — particularly in 2025–2026 with in-house hiring under EBITDA pressure. The proposition is favourable for the employer: they pay only for hours worked, lose National Insurance and benefits overhead, and retain access to the lawyer who already knows the business. The conversation works best framed around continuity of coverage and predictable cost, not the lawyer's autonomy.
What infrastructure do independent lawyers need that firms provide?
Independent lawyers need matter management, time tracking, billing and invoicing, conflict checking, precedents, professional indemnity insurance, and client communication systems. They also need a way to find new clients without spending time on business development. Platforms like Correm provide the infrastructure layer so lawyers can run a full practice without the firm overhead.
Sources
- Taylor Root, UK in-house legal recruitment market update: Q4 2025 hiring activity was notably affected by EBITDA pressure across financial services and professional services. taylorroot.com/market-insight/in-house/uk-in-house-market-update/
- Correm, Fractional Revenue Example (Founder, 2025): 2024 revenue £72k from 3 clients; 2025 revenue £149k at ~29% of full-time capacity, blended realised hourly rate ~£300. At full utilisation the same rate implies ~£518k in annual throughput.