Institutional leadership structures vary widely. Some organizations maintain large and experienced legal departments, while others rely more heavily on outside counsel. AJM Institutional Counsel and Strategy structures its engagements through four service models that allow the firm’s work to align with an institution’s governance architecture and leadership needs.
Each model reflects a different level of integration into institutional decision-making. The models are designed to provide senior legal judgment at the points where decisions become most consequential.
These models are not a fixed menu. They reflect the range of capabilities the firm brings to an engagement — capabilities that can be combined and calibrated to suit the way a specific institution is structured, how its leadership operates, and what it actually needs. Most engagements draw on more than one.
Special Counsel
Under the Special Counsel model, the firm serves as a senior external advisor supporting an institution’s existing legal department.
In this role, the firm provides strategic legal judgment on complex matters that extend beyond a single legal discipline. The purpose is not to replace internal counsel, but to reinforce existing legal leadership when decisions carry heightened legal, political, reputational, or governance consequences.
Special Counsel engagements typically involve advising presidents, chief executives, and general counsel on emerging risks, major strategic initiatives, government scrutiny, regulatory compliance, and other high-stakes matters where legal exposure intersects with operational and reputational considerations.
The firm helps organizations anticipate what lies ahead and navigate difficult decisions with clarity and discipline.
Coordinating Counsel
Under the Coordinating Counsel model, the firm oversees and integrates the work of multiple outside law firms engaged across an institution’s legal portfolio.
Complex organizations frequently rely on specialized outside counsel for litigation, regulatory matters, investigations, and major transactions. While specialization is essential, legal strategy can become fragmented when multiple firms operate independently — leaving institutions simultaneously overexposed and underutilized, too fragmented to act with coherence and too cautious to pursue opportunity.
In this model, the firm assists institutional leadership in selecting appropriate outside counsel, supervising those engagements, aligning legal strategies across matters, and ensuring that specialized advice supports coherent institutional objectives.
The goal is not to duplicate the work of outside firms, but to provide the strategic oversight that keeps an institution’s legal posture disciplined, coordinated, and aligned with executive priorities.
Senior Strategic Advisor
Under the Senior Strategic Advisor model, the firm maintains an ongoing advisory relationship with a senior institutional principal — typically a president, chief executive, board chair, or general counsel.
Unlike traditional outside counsel engagements, this model is defined by continuity of judgment and access rather than by a discrete scope of work. The firm serves as a confidential strategic advisor as leadership considers pivotal decisions, providing perspective on legal implications, governance structures, political dynamics, and reputational consequences before positions solidify and options narrow.
Because the firm operates outside the institution’s internal hierarchy, this advisory role allows leaders to think through emerging challenges with candor and independence that internal structures often cannot provide. Over time, these relationships become an enduring source of perspective on issues that do not fit neatly within traditional legal or operational categories, but that nonetheless shape an institution’s long-term direction.
Outside General Counsel
Under the Outside General Counsel model, the firm serves as the institution’s primary legal advisor — functioning as its central legal architect across governance, regulatory obligations, crisis response, and major initiatives, while coordinating specialized outside counsel engaged for litigation and technically complex matters.
Unlike the Senior Strategic Advisor model, which centers on an ongoing relationship with a specific institutional principal, the Outside General Counsel model is the institution’s primary legal relationship. It integrates senior legal judgment directly into executive and board decision-making from the outset, without expanding internal administrative infrastructure.
Institutions obtain experienced legal leadership with the independence and perspective of outside counsel — and legal strategy that is fully aligned with executive priorities and mission.
Firm Capacity
The firm’s service models are supported by a team of senior attorneys with decades of experience advising colleges, universities, and health systems in senior in-house and leadership roles.
These attorneys bring backgrounds as general counsel, deputy general counsel, and senior institutional advisors at major research universities, independent colleges, and complex healthcare organizations. Their experience spans institutional governance, research administration, commercial contracting, regulatory compliance, healthcare law, executive-level legal affairs, and large-scale organizational strategy. Each has operated within large, mission-driven institutions where legal judgment must be integrated with operational realities and executive decision-making — and each brings that perspective directly to client engagements.
Across all models, the firm’s structure ensures that senior legal judgment — not associate-level work product — is what reaches institutional leadership. And because every engagement is designed around the client’s actual structure and needs, that judgment is delivered in the form that serves leadership best.