What Does a General Counsel Do?

A general counsel (GC) is the most senior lawyer in a company and the person ultimately accountable for its legal function. Where a staff attorney handles matters that land on their desk, the GC owns the whole picture: what legal risks the business runs, how it manages them, and what the executive team and board need to know. It is also among the best-paid legal seats — remote general counsel roles on findremotelawjobs advertise a median near $232,000 a year.

This is a plain-English look at what the job actually involves.

The core mandate

A general counsel is responsible for every legal question the business touches. In practice that means owning a handful of connected areas:

• Commercial contracts — the agreements that run the business, from customer deals to vendor terms.
• Corporate governance — board matters, entity housekeeping, and, at larger companies, securities and reporting obligations.
• Compliance and risk — keeping the company on the right side of the rules that apply to it, and flagging the risks that do not have easy answers.
• Disputes — managing litigation and pre-litigation, usually with outside counsel.
• Employment, privacy, and IP — either directly or by bringing in specialists.

The GC does not personally do all of this. A large part of the job is deciding what to handle in-house, what to send to outside firms, and how to build a team as the company grows.

Who the general counsel works with

The role is unusually cross-functional. A GC advises the CEO and executive team on strategy and risk, supports the board on governance, partners with sales and procurement on the contracts that move revenue, works with finance on deals and compliance, and increasingly with product and security on privacy. That reach is why the seat carries weight: the general counsel is one of the few people who sees the whole business at once.

A day in the role

There is no typical matter, but the rhythm is consistent: a review of the contracts moving through the business, a governance or compliance question from the leadership team, a risk call that does not have a clean answer, and a longer-term project — a policy, a process, a new market. Much of the value is judgment under uncertainty: telling the business not just what the law says, but what to actually do about it.

Because so much of the work is document review, advice, and video meetings, the role sits naturally with remote work — one reason remote general counsel jobs are increasingly common.

In-house versus outside counsel

A central part of the job is deciding what the company handles itself and what it sends to law firms. Day-to-day, repeatable work — standard contracts, routine advice, employment questions — usually stays in-house, where it is faster and cheaper. Specialized, high-stakes, or occasional work — major litigation, a financing, a regulatory investigation — goes to outside firms, with the general counsel managing the relationship, the strategy, and the budget. Building this balance well is one of the clearest ways a GC adds value: it controls both risk and cost.

How it differs from other legal roles

The clearest way to understand a GC is by contrast:

• Versus a staff or associate attorney — a GC owns outcomes for the whole function, not individual matters. The job is as much leadership and business judgment as it is law.
• Versus in-house counsel generally — every GC is in-house counsel, but not every in-house lawyer is the GC. The GC is the top of that structure, a distinction we unpack in general counsel vs in-house counsel.
• Versus a chief legal officer — at many companies these are the same job; at larger ones the CLO is the executive title above the GC. See general counsel vs chief legal officer.

Who becomes a general counsel

GCs almost always arrive with a decade or more of experience, usually a mix of law-firm training and prior in-house work. If the role is a goal rather than a given, how to become a remote general counsel walks through the path.

The bottom line

A general counsel is where legal expertise meets business ownership. The mandate is broad, the accountability is real, and the pay reflects both. For lawyers who want to shape how a company operates rather than react to it, it is the seat to aim for.