General Counsel Services

It usually is once your legal questions become recurring rather than occasional, because hourly engagements carry re-learning costs each time and push you toward avoiding calls you should be making. A retainer converts unpredictable spend into a budget line and removes the hesitation to ask a quick question early, which is when problems are cheapest to fix. For a company with one contract a year, hourly is fine; for one signing agreements monthly, a retainer normally wins.

The trigger is usually activity rather than headcount — typically when you are signing contracts regularly, employing people in the US, handling customer data, or operating in more than one state. Many companies reach that point well before they could justify an in-house lawyer, which is precisely the gap outside general counsel fills. If your founders are spending meaningful time reading agreements themselves, you are already past the threshold.

Yes, and for founder-led companies there are real advantages to it, because the two are constantly connected. How you structure ownership affects an E-2 or EB-1C petition; how you document payroll and job duties affects an H-1B; corporate standing becomes evidence in a visa file. When separate firms handle each side, those links are usually the thing nobody owns. A combined engagement also means one point of contact and no duplicated intake.

The recurring ones are worker misclassification — treating US workers as contractors when the law treats them as employees — state tax and registration obligations triggered by sales or remote staff, missing IP assignments from contractors, informal partner arrangements with no written agreement, privacy and data obligations under state laws, and the federal filings required of foreign-owned entities regardless of revenue. None of these are exotic; they simply do not exist in the same form in Turkish practice.

Response times should be defined in the engagement, not assumed — ask for a stated turnaround for urgent matters and confirm how to reach the team outside normal hours. For Türkiye-based clients the time zone gap matters practically, so agree in advance on a working window that overlaps with Istanbul and a channel for genuine emergencies. Anything urgent involving detention, a court deadline, or a served lawsuit should be escalated immediately rather than by email.

Generally not — most retainers cover advisory and transactional work, with litigation billed separately, because contested matters are unpredictable in scope. What a retainer should cover is the early response: assessing the claim, preserving documents, coordinating with your insurer, and making sure a deadline is not missed while fees are being discussed. Clarify this boundary before you sign, and ask specifically how a demand letter or a served complaint is handled.

Yes, and doing it before the first hire rather than after is significantly cheaper. A pre-hire review covers employee versus contractor classification, offer letter and at-will language, state-specific wage and hour rules, required registrations and insurance in the state where the person works, confidentiality and IP assignment terms, and a basic handbook. The state where your employee sits — not where your company is formed — drives most of these requirements.

One firm coordinates the work and brings in locally licensed counsel where a specific state requires it, so you keep a single relationship rather than managing several. Much corporate, contract, and federal work is not state-limited in practice; court appearances and certain regulated areas are. Ask how local counsel is selected and billed, since that is where costs can quietly expand.

A typical retainer covers ongoing advice, contract review and drafting within a defined volume, corporate maintenance and filings, and regular check-ins. Commonly billed separately are litigation, immigration petitions, M&A transactions, trademark prosecution, government filing fees, and work exceeding the agreed monthly scope. Ask for this split in writing with an explicit description of what happens when a month runs over — a clear scope is what keeps a retainer from becoming a source of friction.

Yes — this is standard and usually produces better outcomes than parallel advisers who never speak. Cross-border structures require the US legal position and the Turkish tax and corporate position to be reconciled, particularly on entity choice, transfer pricing, dividends, and treaty questions. Establishing a direct channel between advisers at the start prevents the common situation where each side assumes the other has addressed something.

Through a maintained corporate record set and a contract repository with key dates tracked — formation documents, ownership records, resolutions, and signed agreements indexed with renewal, termination, and notice deadlines calendared. This matters more than it sounds: investor diligence, a bank review, and immigration filings all require producing complete records quickly, and companies that cannot do so lose time and credibility at exactly the wrong moment.

Yes, and it is often the sensible first step. A legal audit reviews your entity standing and filings, contract templates and signed agreements, IP ownership chain, employment and contractor arrangements, and regulatory exposure, then delivers a prioritized list of what is urgent, what is important, and what can wait. It gives both sides a realistic picture of the workload before a retainer is scoped, and the findings are usually useful on their own.

Yellow Law Group works bilingually in Turkish and English, which matters for more than convenience — legal concepts do not map cleanly between the two systems, and a term translated literally can create a real misunderstanding about what was agreed. Working in your team's own language for internal discussion while keeping the operative documents in English is usually the right arrangement, and it reduces the risk of decisions being made on a partial understanding.

The transition is routine: you send a written notice terminating the prior engagement, request your complete file, which you are entitled to, and the incoming firm reviews it and identifies any imminent deadlines before anything else. Matters with active court or USCIS deadlines should be mapped first, since those cannot slip. Outstanding fees and any lien on the file need to be resolved, and it is usually cleaner to let a nearly-complete matter finish with the current firm rather than move it mid-step.

No, because the two roles do not overlap. Your Turkish counsel handles Turkish law, your Turkish entity and anything before Turkish authorities. We handle US law: your US entity, US contracts, US employment questions and anything before US agencies or courts. Neither can advise on the other's jurisdiction. In practice the two sides need to talk on a handful of specific points, such as transfer pricing, the intercompany agreement and where IP sits, and we coordinate directly with your existing counsel on those rather than duplicating their work.