Can I have a lawyer on an ongoing basis?

What ongoing help looks like for a SaaS company

It looks less like “a lawyer you call” and more like “a lawyer who knows how your company works.” Day to day, that usually means:

• Owning your customer paper: the master agreement, order forms, data processing terms and service levels.
• Reviewing customer redlines and vendor contracts against positions you’ve already agreed.
• Keeping your privacy policy, subprocessor list and AI terms in line with what the product actually does.
• Answering the steady stream of “can we do this?” questions from sales, marketing, product and hiring.
• Getting the company ready for financing or acquisition diligence before anyone asks.

It doesn’t replace litigation counsel, tax advisers or deep regulatory work in areas like securities. Part of the job is knowing when to bring those people in, and giving them the context they need, which can reduce what you pay them.

Signs you’re ready

There’s no single threshold, but some patterns are common:

• You’re reviewing customer or vendor agreements most weeks, not most quarters.
• Sales reps are making their own calls on liability caps or indemnities because waiting for review would lose the deal.
• The same clauses get negotiated from scratch every time, with different outcomes.
• Nobody can say quickly what you agreed to with your three largest customers.

When those are true, the cost isn’t just legal fees. It’s inconsistent terms that pile up, renewals on bad paper, and risk you can’t see until something goes wrong.

Shorter enterprise sales cycles

Much of the delay in enterprise procurement comes from back and forth, not hard legal problems. Three things help:

• A contract playbook. A short document with your standard position on each key clause, the fallback you’ll accept, and what needs escalation. Sales can resolve routine redlines without waiting.
• Paper that anticipates the buyer. If your SaaS agreement already deals with data location, breach notice, security and AI use on reasonable terms, procurement has less to send back.
• One person who remembers. A lawyer who handled your last ten deals knows which concessions you’ve already given and which customers will ask for the same thing.

Security questionnaires and customer privacy reviews

Engineering usually answers security questionnaires, but the answers become contractual promises. They need to match your contracts, your privacy policy and how your systems really work.

Canadian privacy law shapes a lot of this. Under PIPEDA (Schedule 1, principle 4.1.3), you stay responsible for personal information you transfer to a service provider and must use contractual or other means to protect it. You must report a breach of security safeguards to the Privacy Commissioner, and notify affected individuals as soon as feasible, when it’s reasonable to believe the breach creates a real risk of significant harm. Those duties are in sections 10.1 to 10.3 of PIPEDA. You must also keep a record of every breach for 24 months under section 6 of the Breach of Security Safeguards Regulations. Customers will want your contracts to show how you support them in meeting their own duties.

If you have customers or users in Quebec, its private sector privacy law adds obligations, including privacy settings set to the highest level of confidentiality by default for technology products offered to the public, and a privacy impact assessment before personal information is communicated outside Quebec (sections 9.1 and 17 of the Act respecting the protection of personal information in the private sector). See privacy policies for apps.

Why AI companies feel this first

Buyers of AI products often ask the same questions: do you train on our data, which model providers see our inputs, who owns outputs, and how do you handle decisions about people? Quebec already requires notice when a decision about a person is based exclusively on automated processing of their personal information (section 12.1 of its private sector privacy law).

Those answers have to stay consistent across your AI product terms, product documentation, sales materials and privacy notices. That’s hard when each question goes to a different lawyer.

Project work, ongoing help, or an in-house hire

• Project-based work fits when legal needs come in bursts: incorporation, a financing, a one-off contract. See fixed fees.
• Ongoing help fits when legal work is continuous but not yet a full-time job, and context about your product saves time on every request.
• A full-time in-house lawyer fits when there’s enough work to keep one person busy and you want them in leadership meetings every day.

Many companies move through all three. The ongoing stage is when good habits form (a contract repository, standard templates, an approval process), so a future in-house hire inherits a system rather than a backlog.

How it’s usually billed

Arrangements vary. A common one is a fixed monthly fee for a defined scope, with larger projects scoped separately. At For Founders Law, the scope and fee are agreed in writing before work starts. Fees are in Canadian dollars and exclude HST; government filing fees and other disbursements are charged at cost. An outside lawyer can attend board meetings, prepare resolutions and keep corporate records current without holding a board seat. See AI and SaaS contracts.