The company has outgrown its legal infrastructure.
Deals are larger, buyers are more sophisticated, and questions about data, IP, privacy, risk, and governance increasingly affect revenue, product strategy, and enterprise value.
Fractional General Counsel · Interim Leadership · Strategic Advisory
Senior legal and executive leadership, deployed when you need it.
Plug-and-play senior leadership for growth-stage digital health, healthcare AI, and life sciences companies — without forcing the next full-time hire before the business is ready.
I step directly into the business to negotiate critical agreements, solve complex data and IP issues, support financings and transactions, advise management and boards, and build the legal infrastructure required for the next stage of growth.
When companies call me
Usually, something has changed.
You got funded, found product-market fit, moved into commercialization, landed larger customers, lost a senior legal leader, or reached a point where the legal questions are starting to affect the business itself.
The General Counsel is leaving, on leave, or not yet hired.
The company needs someone senior enough to step in immediately — without a six-month search, a long onboarding curve, or pressure to hire permanently before the business is ready.
A critical customer or strategic deal is stuck.
Closing it requires more than legal redlines. It takes someone who understands the commercial objective, the technology, the customer, and where the company can actually take risk.
A financing, transaction, or board moment is approaching.
Management needs the legal function, diligence materials, governance, and decision-making process ready before investors, buyers, or the board start asking questions.
AI is moving faster than the agreements around it.
Rapid advances in AI are creating ownership, training, improvement, output, and data-use questions that many existing contract forms were never built to answer.
The CEO needs a senior gut check.
Sometimes the highest-value contribution is experienced judgment — pressure-testing a decision, shaping a negotiation, reviewing a board message, or giving a founder a second set of eyes before the issue gets expensive.
What I do
I help solve the business problem behind the legal issue.
The job is not simply to identify risk. It is to understand the business objective, determine what actually matters, and help the company move forward with judgment and speed.
I work across provider-facing, life sciences, payor, data, and healthcare AI businesses — from early growth through mature operating scale.
01
Commercial & Strategic Deals
Enterprise SaaS, AI services, data licensing, pharma collaborations, clinical trials, strategic partnerships, risk allocation, indemnification, and liability.
02
AI, Data & IP
Training rights, derived data, model improvement, outputs, ownership, background IP, foreground IP, de-identification, and commercialization rights.
03
Privacy & Regulatory
HIPAA, GDPR, state privacy laws, healthcare AI, digital health regulation, telehealth, licensure, and software-as-a-medical-device questions.
04
Corporate, Board & Transactions
Venture financings, M&A, governance, board preparation, executive decision-making, investor readiness, and diligence.
05
Interim & Fractional Legal Leadership
Day-to-day GC coverage, legal-team leadership, prioritization, outside-counsel management, executive support, founder mentorship, and clean transitions.
Built for changing needs
Scale up. Scale down. Stay senior.
The model is intentionally flexible. Some companies need substantial, embedded leadership for a period of months. Others need a lighter ongoing cadence, a short-term bridge, or senior support around a specific transaction, commercial issue, or leadership gap.
The level of support can change as the company changes. Scale up when the business demands it. Scale down when it does not. Keep access to senior judgment without carrying every capability full time.
Ways to work together
The structure should fit the problem — not the other way around.
Fractional General Counsel
Integrated senior legal leadership for a company that needs a real GC function now, but does not yet need — or is not yet ready for — a full-time General Counsel.
Interim General Counsel
Coverage during a departure, parental leave, executive search, or leadership transition — with enough experience to step in immediately, stabilize the function, and hand it back cleanly.
Strategic Projects & Advisory
Focused support on a commercial, AI/data, regulatory, transaction, governance, board, or executive issue where senior judgment matters more than adding another full-time resource.
About Marc
From lawyer to operator to deployed executive.
“I’ve sat on the legal side, the operating side, the board side, and the transaction side.”
Marc Berger
Founder & Principal, Berger LLC
I’ve spent my career inside companies at moments when the stakes were high and the path forward was not always obvious.
I started as a lawyer, but the work quickly moved beyond legal. At Medidata, I helped support the company through its IPO and a period of significant growth. At Flatiron Health, I served as General Counsel and a member of the executive team, and was one of four executives who led the company’s $2.1 billion sale to Roche.
After Flatiron, I was recruited to Verana Health, another GV-backed healthcare technology company, as its founding General Counsel. Over time, my role expanded well beyond legal: I became CEO and later COO, helping build the legal, operational, and commercial infrastructure required to support the company’s growth, including a $150 million Series E financing.
I have also served as Board Chair of Instem plc and as a General Counsel in Residence at Wilson Sonsini, working with growth-stage companies that needed experienced in-house leadership.
Those experiences shaped how I think about the role I play today. The most important problems inside a growing company rarely fit neatly into a legal box. A customer contract can become a product strategy issue. A data-rights question can determine whether a company owns the value it is creating. A financing can expose operational gaps. A leadership transition can create risk across the entire business.
That is why I built Berger LLC around a model I call Leadership Deployed: senior, experienced leadership that can step directly into the business when the need arises — and flex as that need changes.
Depending on the mandate, that may mean serving as Fractional or Interim General Counsel, leading a critical commercial negotiation, advising the CEO or board, helping prepare for a financing or transaction, or solving a complex AI, data, regulatory, or operating issue.
The goal is not to create dependency. It is to bring the right experience to the company at the right time, solve the problem, strengthen the organization, and leave it better positioned for what comes next.
A broader bench
One senior point of accountability. More expertise when the mandate requires it.
Every engagement is led by me, but it does not have to be limited to me.
Over the course of my career, I have built a trusted network of experienced General Counsels, operators, privacy leaders, regulatory experts, compliance executives, and other senior specialists who can be brought into an engagement when additional capacity, depth, or specialized expertise is needed.
Clients get the speed and accountability of a single senior lead, with access to a broader bench when the problem demands it.
Selected record
I’ve sat on your side of the table.
Flatiron HealthGeneral Counsel & Executive Committee
One of four executives who led Roche’s $2.1B acquisition of Flatiron Health.
Verana HealthFounding General Counsel → CEO → COO
Built legal and operating infrastructure and closed a $150M Series E.
Instem plcBoard Chair
Led the board through the ARCHIMED take-private, 2023–2025.
Medidata SolutionsVP & Assistant General Counsel
Helped support the company through IPO and 400% revenue growth.
Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & RosatiGeneral Counsel in Residence
Advised and covered growth-stage companies requiring experienced in-house legal leadership.
Berger LLCFounder & Principal
Fractional and interim executive leadership for healthcare, digital health, and AI companies.
Representative engagements
Exactly as long as the gap lasts.
12 Months
Fractional GC — Clinical Trial Technology
Serve as fractional General Counsel for an innovative clinical-trial solutions company, handling the full range of legal, risk, and commercial matters — including enterprise and strategic negotiations, compliance, governance, outside-counsel management, and day-to-day executive support as the business scales.
4 Months
Series B Digital Health — Maternity-Leave Coverage
The company’s General Counsel went on leave with no backup in place. I stepped in on day one, integrated into email, Slack, team meetings, and executive workflows, and covered contracting, employment, IP, governance, and the day-to-day legal function until she returned.
8 Weeks
Series C — Legal Leadership Transition
Outgoing counsel had left; incoming counsel was not yet in seat. I covered the gap across contracting, compliance, and governance so the new leader inherited a stable function instead of a backlog.
The model
Fractional should not mean peripheral.
“The expertise you need most is often the expertise you can least afford to carry full time. It has to show up when it matters.”
I call the broader model the Fractional Deployed Executive: senior leadership that embeds into the business, takes ownership of the work, and leaves behind a stronger function rather than a dependency.
Scope the mandate
Define what the business needs, what authority comes with it, and what success looks like.
Deploy & operate
Step directly into the leadership team, own the work, drive decisions, and move the business forward.
Scale or transition
Increase or reduce support as the company’s needs change, then hand off a stronger function when the mandate is complete.
Insights
Writing on healthcare, AI, contracts, and the fractional model.
Start a conversation
Need someone who’s done this before?
Whether you’re building the legal function, filling a leadership gap, closing a major agreement, preparing for a transaction, or simply need a senior gut check, I’m happy to talk.