Litigation Management and Strategy

When a business is sued, or needs to sue, the General Counsel’s job isn’t just to hire litigation attorneys. It’s to own the process, to select and manage outside counsel, to control costs, to ensure the litigation strategy aligns with the business’s actual interests, and to make sure the business keeps operating effectively while the dispute is being resolved.

That’s the function a Fractional General Counsel provides when litigation arises. Victoria doesn’t replace outside litigation counsel, complex litigation requires specialists. What she does is serve as the client-side legal executive who manages the relationship with outside counsel, provides the business context that outside attorneys don’t have, keeps litigation costs from running unchecked, and makes sure the decisions being made in the litigation actually serve the business rather than just the case.

She has managed litigation from the inside, as General Counsel and CLO of companies that faced class actions, mass arbitration filings, regulatory enforcement actions, and commercial disputes. She knows how litigation develops, how outside counsel’s incentives align and diverge from the client’s, where cost control is possible without compromising the defense, and what information the business needs to make informed decisions at every stage of a dispute.

The fractional GC litigation management function also includes the front-end work: identifying disputes before they become lawsuits, preserving evidence and managing litigation holds when a dispute becomes visible, responding to demand letters and pre-suit communications, and making the early strategic decisions, including whether to resolve the matter before it gets to court, that determine how much the dispute ultimately costs.