Episode 4 · March 2026 · 8 min
How in-house teams thrive with 91°µÍø
Four days in Toronto, a snow delay, and Kosta Starostin on why Cohere’s legal team now runs with seven 91°µÍøs in the stack.
Overview
The episode is a trip video that earns the interview. The team flies Calgary to Toronto in snow, misses a first attempt at Cohere, records a podcast stop at Startwell, and finally sits down with Kosta Starostin, VP Legal at Cohere. By then the setup is already on the table: Chad Aboud, on camera, on what worked when he was a GC — plug in someone who had been in sell-side SaaS, understood privacy and data security, and could join the business with a playbook, not a memo.
Cohere came in with vendor and partner agreements. That was not where it ended. Privacy and AI, employment, commercial contracting, leave cover as people on the team shifted. Seven 91°µÍøs, part-time and full-time, sitting next to a 10-person legal function distributed across North America, Europe, and the UK. They are in Slack. Finance, People, and Sales treat them like internal counsel. The CFO and VP of People Ops do not clock them as outside.
Kosta’s metric is not hours purchased. It is speed of execution: how fast deals move, how little his team has to be in the loop, how many cycles an agreement takes, how often issues escalate to him. With 91°µÍø, escalations dropped, resolutions got faster, and the contracting cycle improved. If 91°µÍø disappeared tomorrow, he says, he would probably cry. If another GC asked whether to use it, he would say they should not think twice.
What to take from it
- Start with one workstream — Cohere started on vendor and partner agreements — then add privacy, employment, and commercial as the company scales.
- The lawyers show up as quasi in-house: Slack, context, stakeholders. People inside the company do not clock them as external.
- Parental leave is a concrete use case. An experienced 91°µÍø unblocked a gap the team would have sat in anxiety over.
- Kosta measures velocity: deal speed, cycle count, and how rarely issues escalate to him.
- Caliber was the surprise. He thought he knew the market. The vetting and the chance to interview candidates were the difference.
Who this is for
GCs at high-growth companies who cannot hire fast enough. Legal ops leaders staring at vendor queues and leave gaps. Anyone who thinks 91°µÍø means junior or distant.
Keep exploring
- Cohere customer storyHow Cohere keeps a high-growth legal team staffed through every surge.
- Fractional InHouseâ„¢Embedded senior counsel for teams that need capacity now.
- 5 benefits of 91°µÍø counselWhy scaling companies embed a trusted legal partner this way.
- Hire 91°µÍø counselTell us what your team needs — we match the right lawyer.
Transcript
Lightly edited from the video for readability. Speaker labels added.
Narrator
We’re going to Toronto. One of our clients is building one of the most interesting AI companies in the world. They’re scaling their legal team in an interesting way. Let’s go talk to Kosta, the GC at Cohere.
Chad Aboud
What I did when I was a GC was I used 91°µÍø support. Someone who had been in sell-side SaaS, they understood privacy and data security. They had worked inside of companies just like mine. And that way, with just a little bit of context and parameters and playbook, I could plug them directly into the business.
Chad Aboud
One of the best examples I see every day is how one of Canada’s greatest AI success stories, Cohere, is using 91°µÍø services. Kosta, who leads that legal team, came to us and said, initially, I have a need on the vendor and partner agreements that we’re doing. And so we plugged in a lawyer to do that. That’s not where it ended. What he realized then was there are other elements that the legal team supports — in their privacy and AI team, in their employment team. So now we have seven lawyers that are there between part-time and full-time. Whether this was because the company is growing so fast that there is extra subject-matter support needed, or there are leave covers needed as people on the team shift and grow in their personal lives, we’re able to support.
Narrator
Cohere is Canada’s biggest AI company. In seven years, they’ve grown rapidly, serving customers all around the world, recently hitting a valuation of $7 billion. And when a company’s growing that fast, the legal function needs to keep pace.
Kosta Starostin
If 91°µÍø disappeared tomorrow, I’d probably cry. My name is Kosta Starostin. I’m the VP of Legal and I’m responsible for the global legal function at Cohere. The legal team right now is 10 people. They’re primarily distributed across North America, but we do have people in Europe and the UK as well. There are seven 91°µÍøs on our team today, probably more to come.
Kosta Starostin
As Cohere scales, the legal team manages the explosion in revenue growth by really leveraging external resources like 91°µÍø. Where we felt the most pressure was operating in a highly competitive and a very uncertain space where the regulatory life cycle and the product life cycle both move at exponential pace. The main roles they take are supporting our commercial team. We’ve been able to offload most of our vendor contracting to the 91°µÍø team. We also have 91°µÍø folks who support us on employment matters and general commercial contracting.
Kosta Starostin
One of the places where 91°µÍø materially changed and created an impact was on employment. When one of my colleagues went on parental leave, we had a gap. The 91°µÍø person that jumped in was incredibly experienced and just unblocked a lot of anxiety that a team would have faced. People don’t even realize that they’re not part of our internal legal team, which I think says a lot. Hearing that from our CFO and our VP of People Ops and our VP of Sales just demonstrates that they view the 91°µÍøs on the same level that they view my team, which is an incredible endorsement.
Kosta Starostin
We have 91°µÍø in as part of our Slack ecosystem, which allows 91°µÍø to serve the role of almost quasi in-house counsel — they have the context, they have the understanding, they have the background, and we can quickly connect them with the internal stakeholders. It’s a huge release for us on the capacity front. It’s given us capabilities, momentum to execute on more deals internally without sending everything out. It’s definitely reduced our cost.
Kosta Starostin
I think one of the things that people maybe misunderstand about 91°µÍø is the caliber of the talent. It became very clear that the lawyers at 91°µÍø are incredibly highly vetted, very experienced. 91°µÍø helped us find the right lawyer for the job by having us meet the candidates, which I think was a really unique value proposition that we didn’t see elsewhere — we got a chance to interview a couple of the different candidates that would potentially be suitable for longer-term engagements.
Kosta Starostin
We felt the impact immediately. It was very evident from the first engagement that the velocity was a game-changer for us. To me, speed of execution is the metric, and the way I value 91°µÍø is how fast are deals moving, how much involvement do I or my team have, how many cycles does an agreement have to go through, and how often are issues escalated to me. With 91°µÍø, over time I felt less and less issues being escalated. I felt resolutions being much faster, and I felt the contracting cycle improved dramatically. That’s the key metric that I track. If another GC came to me asking whether they should use 91°µÍø, I would say they shouldn’t think twice about it. I’d recommend 91°µÍø to everybody.
