Senior legal leadership for companies built to grow.
We bring experienced in-house judgment directly into the business — the counsel of a general counsel, without the cost or commitment of building a legal department.
Built on 21 years as senior in-house counsel at Amazon.
- 21 years in-house at Amazon
- General counsel three times over
- Contract simplification programs spanning 50+ business lines
- Admitted in Washington and New York
What we do
Legal counsel built around the business.
Most weeks the question isn't what the rules say. It's which of the twelve things on your desk is the one that will matter in a year.
Growing companies rarely need more law. They need the right judgment, at the right moment, integrated into how the business actually runs.
We work alongside founders, executives and business teams, solving the problem in front of you while building the systems the company will need at three times the size.
Fractional General Counsel
Senior legal leadership without the overhead of a full-time GC. We join the leadership team as an embedded member: advising executives, managing risk, directing outside counsel, and setting the legal priorities appropriate to your stage.
Commercial Transactions
Practical counsel on the agreements and relationships that matter most. We help stand up and preserve the revenue relationships a business is built on: enterprise agreements, strategic partnerships, procurement, technology licensing, and distribution and platform deals.
Legal Operations
A legal function that gets better as the company gets bigger. We simplify contracting, establish repeatable processes, strengthen governance, and identify where technology and AI can remove legal work that shouldn't require a lawyer. The measure of success is capacity: how much more the business can take on without adding legal headcount.
This is the work Marlow spent a decade on at Amazon. He ran a multi-year, company-wide contract simplification program covering more than fifty business lines and the majority of Amazon's contracting use cases, Retail, Marketplace, FBA, AWS, Global Entertainment and Kindle among them. The method was to build simplification frameworks that identify the largest process and template opportunities for a given use case, then work them alongside the legal and business owners who live in that use case daily. A smaller company doesn't need the scale of that program. It needs the method.
Strategic Counsel
The most consequential decisions rarely fit a legal specialty. We advise leadership teams at the point where law meets strategy and operations and help them decide well when the answer is never purely legal.
Who we work with
For companies at an inflection point.
MareVirens is built for organizations whose legal needs have outgrown their legal model. A founder-led company entering its next phase. A business approaching a significant financing, transaction or partnership. An executive team spending too much of its own time on legal questions. An established organization needing experienced legal leadership through a period of change.
Well-suited engagements:
- Growth-stage companies needing senior legal capability before they need, or want, a legal department.
- Founder and executive teams looking for a trusted advisor who understands the business as well as the law.
- Companies preparing to scale, whose contracting and governance must carry far more volume than they were built for.
- Newly public or soon-to-be-public companies facing governance and disclosure obligations for the first time.
- Established businesses that need interim legal leadership, specialized strategic or project support, or transformation of an existing legal function.
The approach
How we think about the work.
Business first.
Effective legal advice starts with what the business is trying to accomplish. Our job is to understand risk well enough that leadership can act on it with confidence.
Senior judgment.
Much of the value of experienced counsel lies in knowing which issues deserve real attention and which do not.
Build for scale.
Solving today's problem is necessary. Designing things so tomorrow's version doesn't take the same effort is better.
Simplify first, then automate.
Contracts and policies accumulate complexity by default. We look for what can be wiped away or made shorter and easier to use, then let AI and automation absorb what's left, while preserving experienced judgment where it matters.
About
Marlow Green, Founder
Marlow has been a general counsel three times: for Internap Network Services, a newly public infrastructure company, and inside Amazon for Audible and for IMDb, then among its two largest subsidiaries.
He spent 21 years at Amazon, from 2003 to 2024, and the range of that work is the point. He began by leading legal support for Amazon's global advertising programs, negotiating the company's first-of-kind advertising relationships with Google and Microsoft and its complex hosting and licensing arrangements with global retailers including Target and Marks & Spencer. He ran legal for Audible and IMDb and supported the early Kindle launches. He directed legal support for Amazon's global Seller Services business, covering Marketplace, Fulfillment by Amazon, Webstore, Checkout by Amazon and Amazon Lending. He was pulled in to launch Amazon Go's cashierless stores. For a decade he directed global innovation, learning and leadership development for Amazon Legal. In his final role he led privacy and data protection compliance across Amazon's media and entertainment businesses, including Amazon MGM Studios, Prime Video, Twitch, Audible, Amazon Music and Amazon Games.
He began in corporate finance, handling public securities offerings, venture financings and M&A at Cooley and Dorsey & Whitney in Seattle, and corporate and project finance for public utility clients in New York. Nearly thirty years later, that early utility work connects directly to his current engagement advising on a first-of-a-kind nuclear generation facility.
He left Amazon in 2024 and took a year off, which was long enough to work out what he actually missed. Not the scale of it. Being close enough to a business to see what was coming, and being the person someone called first.
He holds a law degree from Cornell and has been admitted to practice in New York since 1998 and in Washington since 1999.
Understand the business. Exercise judgment. Simplify complexity. Build what comes next.
Recent work
Recent experience.
Since returning to practice in 2025, Marlow has served as senior commercial counsel on two engagements as contract counsel:
Energy
Supporting the buildout of a first-of-a-kind nuclear power generation facility developed under a cooperative agreement with the U.S. Department of Energy, negotiating engineering, procurement and construction agreements with nuclear industry materials, equipment and services providers, and advising leadership on complex strategic relationships.
Enterprise platform services
Supporting enterprise merchant services business development at a national delivery platform, negotiating complex enterprise revenue agreements and pilots with large national merchants alongside sales, strategy and operations teams.
How we work
Flexible legal leadership, matched to the need.
Our engagements are structured around the business rather than a traditional law-firm model.
Fractional General Counsel
Ongoing senior legal leadership for companies that need GC capability on a part-time or flexible basis.
Embedded Counsel
Dedicated legal capacity working directly with a business or leadership team for a defined period or initiative.
Strategic Projects
Focused engagements scoped on their own terms: a significant transaction, a legal-function build, contracting transformation, governance work, an AI implementation.
Advisory Counsel
A continuing relationship for executives who want experienced legal and strategic judgment available when important issues arise.
What it costs.
Most engagements are monthly retainers. You get a predictable number, and nobody has a reason to hesitate before picking up the phone, which is the failure mode of hourly billing for this kind of work.
Fractional general counsel engagements start at $15,000 per month for a reserved monthly capacity, ordinarily around 40 hours, or roughly a day a week. Work beyond that capacity is billed at $450 per hour. Advisory relationships and defined projects are scoped separately.
A full-time general counsel costs considerably more and works considerably more hours. A fractional arrangement makes sense when a company needs the judgment more than it needs the hours.
How the time works.
A fractional general counsel is not a full-time general counsel, and engagements go best when both sides plan for that from the first week.
In practice it means a standing weekly rhythm, agreed response times for what's genuinely urgent, and a shared view of what the months ahead hold. It also means sending work to outside counsel when that is where the work belongs. Directing that relationship is part of the job.
When a financing, a transaction or an integration needs more for a while, we resize the engagement for that period. Sustained overflow is also a reason to adjust the arrangement.
What we handle, and what we hand off.
A good general counsel knows which matters need a specialist, engages the right one, and manages the work so the company isn't paying a firm to learn its business.
Ordinary course sits with us: commercial contracts, intake and legal operations, professional direction of the company's own legal staff, governance and entity maintenance, and the employment, privacy, regulatory and compliance questions that come up week to week. So does the judgment call about when a question has stopped being ordinary.
Litigation and other adversarial proceedings, corporate transactions and financings, IP prosecution and disputes, specialized tax and regulatory advice, and data-security incident response go to counsel who do that work daily. Our role is to select them, scope the mandate, manage the relationship, and keep the cost and the calendar under control. Where a matter warrants leading it ourselves, it's scoped as its own engagement rather than absorbed into the retainer.
Every engagement sets that line out in writing at the start, so nobody discovers it in the middle of something urgent.
mare, the sea. virens, green, flourishing, growing.
Yes, it's Latin. Lawyers tend to be like that.
The name reflects the Pacific Northwest, and the idea at the center of the practice: legal counsel should vitalize, not paralyze, business growth. It does that by giving leaders the judgment and the structures they need to thrive.
Let's talk
What are you building?
If your business is growing, evolving, transforming, or facing legal complexity its current model wasn't designed to handle, let's talk.
And if you're not sure you need a general counsel yet, that's usually a conversation worth having too.
Marlow Green
Founder, MareVirens Law PLLC
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