Customer agreements, vendor deals, partnerships, and the redlines in between. Negotiations closed on business timelines, not law firm timelines, with terms you actually understand.
Matter No. 001: Fractional General Counsel
Your general counsel, fractional.
GC Bench embeds senior legal counsel in growing businesses. Built for growth, solutions oriented, AI powered with a human touch.
- Yale Law School
- Kirkland & Ellis
- Former In-House GC
Preliminary Statement
Most companies meet their first general counsel the week something goes wrong. A contract signed in a hurry, a termination handled by instinct, a data question nobody owned. By then the cheap answers are gone. GC Bench exists so that growing companies get the counsel of a seasoned general counsel years earlier, at a price that makes keeping one close an obvious call.
How a fractional GC works
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1.1
Intro call
A direct conversation about your business, your legal exposure, and whether fractional coverage is the right fit. Bring your two most pressing legal questions.
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1.2
Scoped engagement
An engagement sized to your volume and risk: contracts, employment, privacy, and whatever the quarter brings. One number a month. No billable hour anxiety.
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1.3
Embedded counsel
Your GC joins the team. Slack, standing calls, board prep, deal rooms. Legal stops being a bottleneck and starts moving at the speed of the business.
What's covered
Three practice areas carry most of the legal weight of a growing company. They are the core of every engagement.
Offers, policies, contractor lines, performance exits. The hard calls answered before they become claims, and a steady hand when one does.
Data practices, vendor security terms, incident readiness, and compliance that keeps pace with the products you ship and the states you sell into.
- HR
- IT & Engineering
- Finance
- Product
- Sales
- Customer Experience
One counsel, every function of the business.
“Legal should be a strategic partner, not a cost center.”
/s/ Demetre Klebaner
Founder & Principal, GC Bench
The counsel
Demetre Klebaner
Demetre started his career at Kirkland & Ellis, one of the largest law firms in the world, then served in government before going in house as General Counsel of a private company. He has sat on every side of the table a growing business will ever face.
He holds a JD from Yale Law School and a BA from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and has been a member of the Illinois bar since 2016. He founded GC Bench to turn legal from a cost center into a strategic partner: modern, tech enabled, cost conscious counsel that businesses of every size can afford to keep close.
GC Bench runs on modern tooling. AI handles the first pass on research, review, and drafting so that counsel hours go where judgment matters. Every answer that reaches you carries a lawyer's name and a lawyer's accountability.
- JD, Yale Law SchoolEducation
- BA, University of Illinois at Urbana-ChampaignEducation
- Kirkland & EllisCareer start
- Government servicePublic sector
- General Counsel, private companyIn house
- Illinois barAdmitted 2016
Questions CEOs ask
What does fractional general counsel mean?
You get a senior lawyer who works as your company's general counsel on a part time basis. Same seat at the table, same accountability, at a fraction of the cost of a full time executive hire.
How is this different from outside counsel at a law firm?
Outside counsel answers the questions you bring them, by the billable hour. A fractional GC sits inside the business, spots issues before they become questions, and manages outside firms when a specialist is genuinely needed.
Do you replace our outside law firms?
No. Specialists still handle specialist work: litigation, patents, tax. Your fractional GC decides when to bring them in, briefs them properly, and keeps their hours honest.
We already have a lawyer we call sometimes. Why change?
Keep them. A fractional GC coordinates that relationship, decides when to escalate, and handles the everyday legal work that never justified a law firm invoice.
What does “AI powered” actually mean here?
Modern AI tools take the first pass at research, review, and drafting, which is why the work moves fast and costs less. Judgment is never delegated. Every answer you receive has a lawyer behind it.
What does an engagement look like and cost?
Engagements are scoped monthly around your volume and risk, and priced as a flat monthly fee rather than hourly billing. Exact pricing is set together after the intro call.
Book a meeting with Demetre
Pick a time that works for you. The intro call is thirty minutes. Bring your two most pressing legal questions.
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