For companies without a legal department
A contract and governance desk for companies that are not ready for a law firm retainer
Corporate legal services are the legal work companies consume to operate: contracts drafted and negotiated, inbound agreements reviewed, governance documents kept current, commercial relationships papered. Most of that work is documents with a definable scope, which means it can be bought per deliverable at a fixed quote instead of through a retainer, an hourly engagement, or a legal department the company does not yet need.
Legal Tank supplies that document layer: licensed attorneys drafting, redlining, abstracting, and standardizing business paper, per document, quoted before work starts. We do not represent companies, appear anywhere, or file anything, and this page is explicit about where that line sits.
Corporate legal support without the engagement letter
Companies below a certain size face a gap: too much legal paper to wing it, too little to justify in-house counsel or a firm relationship priced for one. The per-document model fills the gap by unbundling the work from the relationship. Each contract, agreement, or governance document is quoted as its own fixed engagement, from the document itself, so legal spend tracks deal flow instead of running as fixed overhead. A slow quarter costs nothing; a heavy one is still a list of known numbers approved in advance.
The trade is honesty about scope. A document desk does not advise on strategy, sit in your board meetings, or take the other side's angry phone calls. It produces and inspects the paper, precisely and per piece, and it tells you plainly when a matter has crossed into territory that needs retained counsel.
Contract drafting and review for corporate teams
Four kinds of contract work cover most of what a growing company sends out or signs.
Outbound drafting
MSAs, service agreements, SOWs, NDAs, licensing, and distribution paper drafted from your deal terms, in your favor, against the governing state. Your template becomes an asset instead of a borrowed risk.
Inbound review and redlining
The other side's paper, read against your interests: tracked-changes redline, plain-English risk notes, and ranked negotiation asks, returned fast enough to keep the deal moving.
Abstraction and portfolio work
Existing contract stacks summarized into the fields your team actually queries: parties, term, renewal windows, caps, termination rights. Due diligence and renewals stop being archaeology.
Template standardization
The agreements you reuse weekly, rebuilt once by an attorney into clean standard versions with the variable terms isolated, so routine deals stop generating bespoke risk.
Each has a dedicated page with scope and samples: the business contract drafting service for outbound paper, the redline and risk-memo review desk for inbound agreements, and contract abstraction for existing portfolios.
Corporate governance documents, prepared rather than filed
Governance paper is where the no-filing line matters most, so here it is up front: we draft the documents that define how your company is owned and run, and the filing of anything that must reach a state, the formation certificate, the annual report, stays with you, your accountant, or your registered agent. What we deliver is the layer filings do not cover, the agreements between the humans.
LLC operating agreements
Member rights, capital, distributions, and exit mechanics that match how the company actually runs, not the default statute.
operating agreement draftingShareholder agreements
Transfer restrictions, drag and tag rights, deadlock resolution, and valuation mechanics settled while everyone is still friendly.
shareholder agreement preparationPartnership agreements
Contribution, allocation, authority, and dissolution terms for ventures that outgrew the handshake.
partnership terms put in writingConfidentiality and IP paper
NDAs, IP assignments, and non-competition terms that hold up in the states where your people actually work.
NDA drafting for business useWhen the volume grows: outsourcing the whole document function
Per-document quoting is the front door, not the ceiling. Companies and legal departments with recurring volume, every inbound vendor agreement screened, every quarter's contracts abstracted, move onto standing arrangements where the same attorney bench works as a process: how legal process outsourcing engagements are structured covers rates, security, and workflow. Law firms buying drafting capacity for their own clients have a separate program built for attorney supervision, and consultancies that want the work delivered under their own brand use the unbranded wholesale drafting arrangement.
Confidentiality scales with the engagement: portal-only document handling on every matter, NDAs signed on request, and business associate agreements available where the paper touches health information.
Legal Tank is not a law firm and does not provide legal representation, appear before courts or agencies, negotiate as your company's representative, act as registered agent, or file documents with any state or court. Business documents are drafted or reviewed by licensed attorneys and delivered for your company's own use, with no attorney-client relationship formed.
Send the first document
One agreement to draft or one inbound contract to review is a normal first engagement. The quote states the deliverable, the fixed fee, and the turnaround before anything is billed.
Get a corporate document quoteCorporate legal services FAQ
What do corporate legal services include?
The term covers everything a company buys from lawyers, but in practice most corporate legal spend is documents: contracts drafted and negotiated, inbound agreements reviewed and redlined, governance paperwork kept current, and commercial relationships papered correctly. Representation in disputes and regulatory advocacy sit in a separate, smaller bucket that genuinely requires a law firm. A document-desk model serves the first bucket at per-document prices; the second bucket is what retainers are for.
What is the difference between corporate legal services and hiring a corporate lawyer?
Hiring a corporate lawyer, in-house or at a firm, buys a relationship: someone on call, carrying context, advising on strategy, and representing the company when things go wrong. Buying corporate legal services per document buys deliverables: this MSA drafted, this vendor agreement redlined, this stack of contracts abstracted, each at a known price. Growing companies usually need deliverables years before they can justify the relationship, which is why the per-document model exists.
How much does an outside general counsel cost?
Fractional general counsel arrangements commonly run several thousand dollars a month for a set allotment of hours, and full-time in-house counsel is a six-figure salary before benefits. That spend makes sense when legal questions arrive daily. When what actually arrives is a contract a week, pricing the work per document, each piece quoted from the document itself, covers the need at a fraction of either number, and scales up or down with the quarter.
Can a company outsource its legal work?
The document layer, yes, and companies of every size already do. Drafting, review, redlining, abstraction, and template standardization are defined-scope tasks that travel well: they depend on the deal terms and the governing law, not on physical presence. What cannot be delegated to a non-firm provider is advocacy, appearing in disputes, negotiating as the company's legal representative, and signing court papers, which stays with licensed counsel engaged by the company.
Do you form companies or act as a registered agent?
No. We prepare the documents that formation and governance require, operating agreements, bylaws, shareholder agreements, board resolutions, but we do not submit filings to any state, act as registered agent, or appear before any agency. Your team, your accountant, or an incorporation platform handles the filing step; the papers we deliver are ready for exactly that.