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Cohere is one of Canada's largest AI companies, and after seven years of rapid growth, its legal function has had to scale at the same pace as the business — inside a highly competitive, uncertain space where the regulatory and product roadmaps both move at exponential pace.

In a busy quarter, that pressure compounds: parental leaves, commercial and vendor work that still needs senior judgment, and specialist questions in privacy, AI, and employment that can't wait for a six-month search.

The brief to �鶹��Ƶ was capacity with context — lawyers who could join Slack, learn the playbooks, and keep work moving alongside the in-house team, not hand matters off to a firm that needed weeks to ramp up.

It started small: Kosta's first ask was help with vendor and partner agreements, so �鶹��Ƶ plugged in a single fractional lawyer. That's not where it stayed. As trust built, Cohere brought �鶹��Ƶ into privacy-adjacent work, AI matters, and employment coverage — the areas needing the most depth. Today, seven lawyers are embedded across the team, moving between part-time and full-time as needs shift.

Each fractional joined the same Slack channels and cadences as the rest of legal, giving them enough context to operate like quasi in-house counsel. When a colleague went on leave, the �鶹��Ƶ lawyer who stepped in was experienced enough to absorb the gap immediately — removing the anxiety a thinner team would otherwise have faced.

Scopes tie to real workstreams with a clear definition of done. Hours flex when a launch, financing, or leave cycle spikes, and ease when the pipeline cools — without reopening procurement every time capacity needs to move.

Rather than simply assigning talent, �鶹��Ƶ had Cohere meet the candidates directly, interviewing a few fractional lawyers before choosing who to bring onto longer-term engagements — a step Kosta calls a value proposition he hasn't seen elsewhere. It lines up with what he found once lawyers were in seat: highly vetted, highly experienced counsel.

An engagement lead sits across the mandate, so new specialists can be spun up in a sprint instead of Cohere running another full search.

The team kept commercial, privacy, and employment work moving through the busiest stretches of the year, and leadership stayed focused on the calls only they could make.

For Kosta, the clearest signal has been speed: how fast deals move, how much of his team's time gets pulled in, and how often something gets escalated to him. Over time, escalations dropped, resolutions got faster, and the contracting cycle improved dramatically — the metric he tracks most closely. It's also freed up real capacity, letting the team execute more deals internally at a lower cost than the alternative.