The dictionary answer is that a general counsel is a lawyer who advises a company. True, but not helpful. For a growing New York software company with no lawyer on staff, the job is noticing when the company’s own documents and practices have fallen behind the law or the market, and acting before a customer, a regulator, or a departing employee notices first. New York general counsel services get called in for exactly these moments.
When an engineer leaves
Suppose a departing engineer claims that part of the company’s product relies on technology that they built before joining. A good GC understands that the protection of the company’s rights begins at onboarding, ensuring that the engineer signs an assignment agreement that identifies any pre-existing inventions that relate to the product. If no such pre-existing inventions are identified, the engineer would have a weak basis to argue to contrary at exit. And if they are identified, the GC would ensure that they are assigned or licensed to the company. The GC would also ensure that the assignment respects New York Labor Law § 203-f, which excludes certain inventions developed entirely on the employee’s own time. Since departures are a fact of life, they must be considered in advance.
A GC would also help script the offboarding process. At a minimum, this should include: signed confirmation of what the employee built and returned, return of all company equipment, same-day revocation of code repository and cloud access, and a written confidentiality reminder.
The GC also prepares for the engineer leaving for a competitor. New York’s proposed non-compete legislation (S9759/A10023), which passed the state Senate on June 3, 2026, but has not yet been passed into law, would ban non-competes for anyone earning under $500,000. A GC would monitor this situation closely. In an environment increasingly hostile to blanket non-competes, a GC would look to appropriately drafted non-solicitation and confidentiality terms to protect proprietary assets.
When the law changes and the terms of service do not
Changes in the law can necessitate changes to a company’s product and the company’s customer-facing documents. This is particularly true for Artificial Intelligence. For instance, the SHIELD Act amendments, signed December 2024, which require breach notice to affected Nw York residents within 30 days of discovery. The GC checks that the incident-response plan would meet that deadline and that the privacy policy accurately describes the company’s practices.
Another example is California’s AB 2013, the Generative AI Training Data Transparency Act, effective January 1, 2026, requires developers of generative AI systems made available to the public in California, including systems substantially modified by retraining or fine-tuning since January 2022, to publicly post a high-level summary of training datasets.
A GC communicates with product and engineering to make sure that that the terms of service and privacy policy align with curent law and the actual product features.
When the customer’s redline arrives
Common Paper’s 2026 SaaS Contract Benchmark Report identifies trends in signed agreements on its platform: cloud service agreements prohibiting the vendor from training AI on customer data rose from under 1% in 2024 to 14% in 2026; agreements with uncapped liability for certain claims rose from 1.1% in 2025 to 10.2% in 2026.
The GC sets the company’s positions once, in a negotiation playbook: the liability cap, which claims sit above it (data breach, IP indemnity, confidentiality), whether customer data ever trains a model, and the answer when a buyer asks for a SOC 2 Type II report the company does not yet have. Each negotiation becomes a comparison against the playbook rather than a fresh argument between sales and procurement. Deals close faster, and the company stops accepting in one contract what it refused in another.
Where this leaves a growing company
None of this requires a full-time hire; it requires one lawyer who reads the company’s own documents as closely as the customer’s and is still there next quarter. Braverman Law provides that standing relationship for New York technology companies.
