Concepts: Legal Innovation; Law and Finance

A conversation about a post-pandemic practice pivot, litigation as project management “as needed,” and what companies without in-house litigation counsel are missing.

For a long time, “in-house” meant a company had crossed a certain size threshold: enough contracts, enough regulatory touchpoints, enough disputes (or threatened disputes) to justify building a legal department. But an alternative has emerged — companies keeping their core teams lean while bringing in senior legal judgment on a part-time, flexible basis. On a recent episode of the Emerging Litigation Podcast, I spoke with Jonathan Sablone, founder of Sablone Advisory LLC, about why that model works and what it looks like when the lawyer is, in his words, a “fractional general counsel” and a litigation manager. 

From Big Law leadership to a one-person shop 

Sablone’s résumé reads like a tour through the high-end litigation market. He spent some 25 years at global firms including Nixon Peabody and DLA Piper, where he held leadership roles and built practices focused on complex commercial and private funds disputes. His work has spanned the financial services world—private equity funds, hedge funds, institutional investors—and often had a cross-border component. He studied government at Harvard and earned his J.D. from Boston College Law School. 

What changed wasn’t a lack of interest in the substance of litigation—it was the setting. When the pandemic forced courtrooms, mediations, and client interactions onto screens, Sablone realized something about his own wiring. “I discovered that as much as I loved practicing law, I despised practicing law by Zoom,” he told me. “It was not for me. I’m a people person. I like to read people. I like to be in the room with them.” 

For him, Zoom practice wasn’t just less pleasant; it removed real-time information he relies on. “In the courtroom, I want to see not just what the judge is doing,” he said. “How is the court officer reacting to what you’re saying? How are the other participants reacting? You need to read that room to be an effective litigator, an effective trial lawyer.” 

In 2021, a client made him an offer that would have been easy to dismiss in a different year: join a litigation finance-focused private equity fund, Delta Capital, to help originate investments—essentially, to “go out and find deal flow for the fund,” where “deal flow means litigation—go find cases we can invest in.” He took the leap, later becoming the fund’s chief litigation officer and overseeing the matters the fund had backed. The role let him stay close to the work he enjoys—strategy, mediation, and settlement thinking—without carrying the entire load of being counsel of record. As he put it, “it’s fun being in court at trials and other things where you’re not the one having to do all the work.” 

“As much as I loved practicing law, I despised practicing law by Zoom.” 

After leaving the fund, he took a rare sabbatical, then started mapping his next act. Returning to a major firm was an option, but the economics—and what those economics do to day-to-day practice—gave him pause. “When I left DLA Piper in 2021, my billing rate was $1,200 an hour, which I thought was obscene and still think it’s obscene,” he said. “Rates over the last five years at major firms have doubled and tripled, so my rate today would be somewhere around $2,500 an hour.” 

At that price point, “I would have been very limited in what I could do—what types of matters you can take on, what types of clients you can take on, how your everyday world is going to be shaped.” Cases must “support not just your fee structure, but younger partners and associates who are very expensive.” Launching Sablone Advisory, by contrast, meant “a one-person shop at a much lower billing rate than I would have at another place billing at $2,500 an hour.” 

“Fractional general counsel” (and why the litigation part matters) 

The phrase “fractional general counsel” can sound like startup jargon, but the need it describes is straightforward. Many mid-market companies and private funds either have no in-house lawyers at all, or they have a small legal function geared toward corporate work, deals, or regulatory issues. What they often don’t have is litigation expertise sitting inside the business—someone who can sense when a dispute is heading toward a cliff, translate outside counsel’s recommendations into business terms, and push back intelligently when the path gets too expensive or too expansive. 

As Sablone put it, for many business executives and fund managers, litigation is “not a world they swim in—and nor should they.” The issue isn’t that outside counsel is giving bad advice; it’s that clients “don’t know enough to question some of the advice that the lawyers are giving them.” That’s where a litigation manager earns their keep: “Knowing the right questions to ask can often change the direction of what the advice looks like. Knowing where to push back.” 

He gave concrete examples. “When your lawyer says we have to do X—we have to do this type of discovery to get to this point—most clients say, ‘Okay.’” But an experienced litigator can press: “What’s the cost point of that? What if we did it this way? What if we took fewer depositions? What if we tried to limit our production to this subset of issues?” Those kinds of questions, he said, “can have huge cost savings and in many cases not impact the overall strategy.”

“Knowing the right questions to ask can often change the direction of what the advice looks like. Knowing where to push back.” 

Importantly, the role he’s describing isn’t limited to filed cases. “When we say litigation, it doesn’t always mean there’s an active case that’s been filed and you’re fighting,” he said. “A lot of it is pre-dispute and resolution.” 

The scope of the role goes beyond litigation. “You can hire people like me to do other things like contract management, contract review, corporate governance, compliance,” he said. Even after decades as a litigator, he’s candid about the limits of any one lawyer: “I know what I don’t know. You must know enough to bring in somebody else who does.” 

The “all-you-can-eat bucket”: a fee idea that reduces disputes 

One of the most practical ideas from our discussion was his description of a flat-fee monthly arrangement he used with a fund client—what his team called the “all you can eat” bucket. Under that arrangement “they paid me a flat fee every month and I made myself and my team available to answer legal questions.” The reason, he explained, was behavioral: “Every time one of the asset managers would call the lawyer, the lawyer would send a bill, which discouraged the asset managers from calling the lawyers. When you discourage people from calling lawyers, they make decisions that get them in trouble and end up in disputes.” 

The all-you-can-eat bucket flips that incentive: “It encourages your team to seek legal advice because the cost is the same whether they call or they don’t call.” In his experience, that change in behavior meant “the number of disputes drastically was reduced,” and even when disputes still happened, “they weren’t as massive or as big or as damaging as they could have been.” 

Cross-border disputes: when “coordination” is the whole ballgame 

Sablone underscored a problem that shows up the minute a dispute crosses borders (or even just spawns parallel matters in multiple U.S. jurisdictions): coordination becomes its own workstream. In these matters, he said, you can have “multiple sets of lawyers doing what’s right for the client in the jurisdiction in which they reside,” but “they’re not necessarily effectively coordinating with everybody else.”  

Otherwise, the risk is inconsistency and unintended consequences. “You don’t want to be in a position where your lawyer in the U.S. takes a position on a discovery matter that impacts the disclosure they have to do in the U.K.,” he said, noting that U.S. discovery decisions can force data collection abroad, which “implicates privacy regulations in Europe or in the U.K.” 

You can ask one of the big firms to quarterback that work, he acknowledged, “but again, you’re paying an awful lot of money for that essentially case management function.” The point is to ensure “an overarching strategy to resolve all the cases,” rather than “doing what’s right in one case and making things worse for another case in a different jurisdiction.” 

Why this model is showing up now 

When I asked Sablone for a final thought, he came back to the market reality. “The services we’ve talked about today have always been necessary. What’s really changed over the last five years is the billing structures.”  

It’s unusual, he said, for rates to increase 2X and 3X in a period of just a few years. And while he has heard “since the day I began practicing” that the billable hour is dead, he said "the billable hour is alive and well.” 

His broader point is that “the numbers have gotten so large that there’s a huge segregation in the marketplace.” At the top are firms that can command $2,000, $3,000 an hour, and at the other end are niche specialists. “Then you’ve got everything in between,” he said, “and it’s everything in between that’s all shaking out.” That shakeout is part of why the fractional model feels newly timely: clients are looking for “somebody at a more reasonable price point, or on an alternative fee basis, even if it’s a fixed fee.” 

______________________________________________________________________________

Jonathan Sablone, leveraging decades of law and finance experience, founded Sablone Advisory LLC to assist clients with the most intractable problems and issues facing the financial services and legal industries. Reach him at jsablone@sabloneadvisory.com or +1 (617) 460-2591.  

The Emerging Litigation Podcast is produced by Critical Legal Content LLC, a fractional multimedia, multiplatform content department producing blogs, articles, podcasts, webinars and more for boutique law firms and service providers. It is hosted by Tom Hagy, author of this piece, a long-time legal editor and former publisher of Mealey’s Litigation Reports. You can reach him at Editor@LitigationConferences.com.  

Copyright 2026 Critical Legal Content LLC. HB Litigation and the Emerging Litigation Podcast are brands owned by Critical Legal Content.  

Tom Hagy
Litigation Enthusiast and
Host of the Emerging Litigation Podcast
Home Page
LinkedIn