Eight weeks after close, here’s what’s on the table. Two hundred customer contracts carry change-of-control clauses that may need consent or novation. Three employment agreements conflict with your standard terms. A regulator wants a notification filed by a date already circled on someone’s calendar. The lease needs the landlord’s consent to assign. And nobody in the building is a lawyer.
The instinct is to hire a general counsel. That instinct is half right: you probably do need a lawyer in the building. What it gets wrong is the level. The workload in front of you is the loudest it will ever be, and hiring against a peak is how acquirers end up with a senior title, a senior salary, and a role that has shrunk by year two.
If you’re building a permanent legal function for a stable business, that’s a different decision, covered in building an in-house legal department. Here the question is narrower: you bought a company, and you have to decide which seat to open.
What integration legal work actually consists of
Post-acquisition legal work is high-volume, moderate-complexity, and finite. In our experience most of it wraps within twelve to eighteen months, in workstreams predictable enough to scope in advance:
- Contract novation and change-of-control review. Every material agreement read for change-of-control language, then triaged: which need consent, which need assignment, which novate cleanly. On a mid-sized book, hundreds of documents.
- Employment harmonization. Terms, benefits, notice provisions and union considerations reconciled against the acquirer’s standard package. Getting this wrong creates liability that surfaces years later.
- Regulatory notifications and licence assignments. A change of ownership triggers filings, transfers or approvals on statutory deadlines.
- IP assignment. Confirming the business owns what it claims to, and assigning it into the new structure.
- Insurance and lease transfers. Policies re-papered, leases assigned with landlord consent, coverage gaps closed.
Read that list again and notice what it is. It is senior commercial contracting, executed at volume, against deadlines. It is not board advisory, not litigation strategy, not the work a general counsel is hired to do.
Why the shape of the work decides the level
A general counsel is a strategic seat: risk register, board reporting, external counsel budget, the judgment call about which of fifty matters is live this quarter. Integration work needs almost none of that. It needs someone who can read two hundred contracts accurately and fast, and who knows what a consent-versus-novation call actually turns on.
Hire a GC into that and two things happen. For the first year the strategic half of the role has nothing to do, and for the second year the contracting half has nothing to do. Either they move on, or the company invents work to justify the seat.
Size the seat to what remains after the wave, not to the wave itself. The market is drifting the same way: CLOC’s 2026 State of the Industry Report, surveying 135 law departments, found only 32% expected to add attorney headcount while 63% reported rising regulatory compliance workload. Teams are absorbing more work without adding senior titles.
Why permanent beats a contractor here
The obvious response to finite work is a fixed-term contractor. We think that’s the wrong call for integration, for four reasons that have nothing to do with what we sell.
The knowledge is the asset, and it walks. Whoever reads those two hundred contracts finishes the year knowing more about the acquired business than anyone else in the building: which customers are difficult, where the terms are non-standard, which supplier relationship is fragile. On a defined term, that leaves on the last day and you pay someone else to learn it again.
The residual work always outlasts the wave. Consents come back late. A regulator asks a follow-up in month twenty. An assigned lease throws up a landlord dispute in year two. There is no clean end date, only a taper, and a term that ends on a date will end in the middle of something.
The arithmetic rarely favours the contract. Twelve months of firm rates or a contractor’s day rate, fully loaded, will generally exceed a year of senior counsel salary. You pay the premium for flexibility you then discover you didn’t want.
The candidate pool is narrower. Senior lawyers who take defined-term work are a real segment, but a much smaller one, and hiring from it means compromising on fit for a role where fit with your specific contract base is the whole job.
Integration is also the best possible interview for the steady-state seat. A year in, you know exactly what your ongoing legal load looks like, and so does the person doing it. That is an argument for hiring them permanently at the start, not for renting them and starting again.
Comparing the seats
| Option | Cost, Toronto | Fit during the integration wave | Fit in year three |
|---|---|---|---|
| Senior commercial counsel, 5 to 8 years of call | $175K to $235K base | Strong. This is precisely the work | Strong wherever contract volume holds up |
| Deputy general counsel | $275K to $335K mid-market | Overqualified for novation volume | Right only once there is a legal team to lead |
| General counsel | $280K to $380K mid-market | Overqualified, and the strategic half has nothing to do yet | Right only where the three tests below hold |
| Secondment from deal counsel | Billed at firm rates | Fastest for the first 90 days of triage | Ends. A bridge, not a hire |
A secondment from deal counsel is worth naming because it is genuinely the fastest option for the opening weeks: the lawyer already knows the transaction. But that firm represents the acquirer. Where interests are aligned it’s efficient; where they might diverge, you risk advice that favours the acquirer’s position over your own. It is also billed hourly against a workload that runs for a year, which is why almost nobody keeps one past the triage stage.
Senior commercial counsel is the seat most acquirers actually need. At the midpoint of each band it costs roughly $125,000 less than a GC in base salary, it matches the work in front of you, and it stays the right size once the wave passes. Bands are from our 2026 salary guide, published in full and ungated, and broken down further by company size.
When a general counsel genuinely is right
Open the GC seat when the acquired business will generate its own strategic legal demand, not just contract volume. Three tests:
- It retains a distinct regulatory footprint. Ongoing filings, monitoring and compliance work indefinitely is steady-state demand that needs someone accountable for it.
- It keeps contracting as a separate entity. If it continues to sign its own agreements under its own name, someone has to own that function permanently, including the risk posture behind it.
- It has its own acquisition program ahead of it. If the business you bought is itself a buyer, integration work becomes recurring and someone has to run it as a programme.
If any of the three holds, hire the GC. Counsel and senior counsel searches close in six to nine weeks, and Deputy GC and General Counsel mandates run ten to fourteen weeks, which we take retained. The same tests apply in reverse when you’re running a general counsel search for a stable business.
If none holds, open the counsel seat instead and revisit the title in two years. We would rather tell you that before you brief a search than after you’ve carried a GC salary through a role that shrank.
Scoping the role properly
Write the job around the workstreams, then around what follows them. Three things to get right:
- Name the wave in the spec. Contract novation, employment harmonization, regulatory filings, and the point at which each is done. A candidate who understands they’re walking into a defined programme will plan for it.
- Say what comes after. The strongest candidates ask what the role looks like in year two. If the honest answer is commercial contracting plus a growing compliance load, say so. It’s a good job.
- Give them a decision-maker. Counsel move fast only when someone can approve, sign and escalate without a committee.
Because we recruit across both the law firm and in-house sides of the Canadian legal market, we can tell you which lawyers have actually run a novation programme rather than which ones have the words on a CV. Our legal team includes former practising lawyers, so that screening conversation is substantive. We send first resumes typically within 24 hours of intake, shortlists run two to eight candidates, and you get weekly written updates with a live pipeline view. For context on the pool, CBA In-House Lawyers serves more than 5,000 in-house professionals across every province and territory.
The decision you’re probably making twice
The person choosing the legal seat is usually choosing the finance seat in the same quarter: same contracts, same close, same deadlines.
This is the part most firms can’t help with, and the clearest reason to run both through us. We recruit across legal, accounting and finance, and operations and administration, so one conversation covers the integration counsel, the controller consolidating two ledgers, and the operations lead merging two back offices. You aren’t repeating the deal context to three agencies with three views of what the business now looks like. On the finance side, controller and VP Finance searches close in six to ten weeks and CFO mandates run eight to twelve weeks retained. Our accounting and finance practice covers that side.
The deal environment makes this live for more owners than usual. Year-to-date 2025 Canadian M\&A deal value ran US$125.2 billion above the same period a year earlier, even as volume fell. The Canadian Venture Capital and Private Equity Association counted CAD $56.5 billion of private equity investment across 483 deals in the first nine months, which the association reports as the strongest nine-month stretch on record.
If you want a straight read on which seat your situation calls for, we have that conversation regularly, and we’ll tell you when the answer is a smaller title than you were planning. We place permanently, on contingent search by default with no fee until a candidate is placed, moving to retained for general counsel and executive seats, and for law firm partner and group moves, with fee terms and replacement guarantee in writing before the search starts. See how we work on our legal recruitment page, or tell us what you’re dealing with.
FAQs
Should we hire a general counsel after an acquisition?
Only if the acquired business will generate its own strategic legal demand once the integration work is done. Three tests: it retains a distinct regulatory footprint, it keeps contracting as a separate legal entity, or it has its own acquisition program ahead of it. If none holds, the work in front of you is senior commercial contracting at volume, and a senior counsel seat matches it better and stays the right size afterwards.
What level should we hire for post-acquisition integration work?
Senior commercial counsel, roughly five to eight years of call. Integration work is contract novation, employment harmonization, regulatory filings and IP assignment: high volume, moderate complexity, deadline-driven. In Toronto that seat runs $175K to $235K in base salary against $280K to $380K for a mid-market general counsel, and it remains correctly sized once the wave passes.
Should we use a fixed-term contract lawyer instead?
Usually not. The person who reads two hundred contracts finishes the year knowing more about the acquired business than anyone in the building, and on a defined term that knowledge leaves on the last day. Residual work outlasts the wave, twelve months of contract rates generally exceeds a year of senior counsel salary, and the defined-term candidate pool is much narrower. Integration is the best interview there is for the steady-state seat, which argues for hiring permanently at the start.
How long does it take to fill the seat?
We send first resumes typically within 24 hours of intake. Counsel and senior counsel searches close in six to nine weeks; Deputy GC and General Counsel mandates run ten to fourteen weeks and are taken retained. Shortlists run two to eight candidates with weekly written updates throughout.
Can you staff the finance side of an integration as well as the legal side?
Yes, and it’s the main reason acquirers run both through us. Integration legal and finance work land in the same quarter, on the same contracts and the same close, and splitting them across two agencies means briefing the deal twice. We recruit across legal, accounting and finance, and operations and administration, so one conversation covers the integration counsel, the controller consolidating two ledgers, and the operations lead merging two back offices. Counsel roles close in six to nine weeks, controller and VP Finance searches in six to ten, on contingent search by default with no fee until a candidate is placed.
