Embedded general counsel for healthcare & AI

Embed legal judgment into your organization.

RAA builds and operates the legal function for growing healthcare and AI companies—working inside the team so legal judgment is available where decisions happen, without adding unnecessary process or slowing the business down.

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The approach

Legal should help the business move.

Growing companies don't need more legal process. They need the right judgment, at the right time, from someone who understands what they're trying to accomplish.

RAA works as a senior in-house member of the team—close enough to the business to answer questions quickly, spot issues before they become problems, and distinguish what actually needs legal attention from what doesn't.

Fewer handoffs. Less re-explaining the business. Faster decisions.

The goal is not to put Legal into everything. It's to build enough shared context and infrastructure that good legal judgment becomes part of how the company operates.

Embedded means embedded.

Work inside the team

Don't send a memo to outside counsel and wait.

RAA works directly with founders, executives and functional leaders in the tools and conversations where the business already operates. Slack a question. Pull RAA into a working session. Bring counsel into a negotiation before positions harden.

Because RAA knows the company, its business model and its priorities, the conversation can usually start with the problem rather than the background.

The result is the accessibility and context of a senior in-house lawyer without having to build the legal department before the company is ready.

Own the legal function

Someone should wake up thinking about what Legal needs to accomplish next.

RAA helps set priorities and takes ownership across the legal function: commercial relationships, regulatory and compliance questions, corporate and governance needs, product counseling, risk management, strategic transactions, and the thousand smaller questions that arise while building a company.

When a matter calls for specialized expertise, RAA helps find the right specialist, scopes the work, manages the relationship, and turns specialist advice into practical decisions for the business.

One legal function. Not a collection of law firms for the team to manage.

Drive commercial relationships

Legal should help get good relationships built, not simply review the paper afterward.

RAA works alongside the team across customer, partner, vendor, provider and other strategic relationships—from structuring the arrangement through negotiation, signature and what comes next.

That means understanding the commercial objective, helping shape the deal, negotiating the agreement, developing practical positions and playbooks, and resolving issues in real time with the people responsible for getting the relationship across the line.

Less “business versus legal.” More of the company working together to get good deals done.

Legal infrastructure

Build judgment into the company.

The best legal function gets more capable as the company grows—not simply busier.

As RAA learns the business, recurring judgment becomes infrastructure: scalable agreements, compliance frameworks, policies, playbooks, decision pathways, governance processes and institutional knowledge.

Increasingly, that can include custom AI-enabled workflows, Skills and agents built around the company's business and regulatory environment—tools that can surface established guidance, conversationally gather the facts needed for recurring legal determinations, generate useful work product, and recognize when an issue needs human judgment.

The objective isn't AI for its own sake. It's leverage: make what the company already knows easier to use, reserve lawyer time for the questions that deserve it, and keep exploring better ways to deliver legal judgment as the technology evolves.

Build. Operate. Systematize. Scale.

Build

Establish the legal architecture the business actually needs—from foundational agreements and governance to regulatory frameworks, commercial positions, policies and processes.

Not everything at once. What the company needs, when it needs it.

Operate

Serve as the company's embedded senior legal partner: setting priorities, counseling the team, driving relationships and transactions, solving problems, and coordinating the broader legal function.

Systematize

Turn repeated decisions into leverage—templates, playbooks, workflows, compliance frameworks, institutional knowledge, and appropriately governed AI tools and agents.

Questions that have already been answered shouldn't always require another lawyer-hour.

Scale

As the company grows, the legal function grows with it. RAA can continue operating it, work alongside an expanding internal team, or help transition what has been built to the company's eventual General Counsel.

Build the legal function your team will eventually inherit.

Healthcare & AI

Deep context where it matters.

RAA is built for companies operating where healthcare, technology, data and evolving business models meet.

The important question is rarely just what an agreement says. It's how the business actually works: who the parties are, what each is doing, how money and data move, which regulatory frameworks apply, where risk actually sits, and what the company is trying to accomplish.

Those questions cut across legal specialties. Embedded counsel can see the whole picture, move quickly on what is familiar, and bring in specialized expertise where it genuinely adds value.

Experience

Experience behind the judgment.

Richard Andrews has spent his career helping companies build, transact and navigate complexity.

Before founding RAA, Richard spent five years at Transcarent, joining as employee #23 and ultimately serving as Vice President & Associate General Counsel. He helped build the company's legal infrastructure as it scaled, working across the business on commercial relationships, regulatory and operational questions, governance, risk and strategic transactions.

Earlier, Richard practiced at Latham & Watkins and Wilson Sonsini, advising on more than $10 billion in public and private M&A, venture financings, governance and strategic transactions. At Transcarent, he later led or supported major transactions including the approximately $621 million acquisition of Accolade and the acquisition of 98point6's AI-powered virtual-care platform.

The résumé matters less than what that experience taught him: good legal advice starts with understanding the business.

About Richard

A little about Richard.

RAA is deliberately a personal practice.

I'm based in Los Angeles and built RAA around the kind of legal work I enjoy most: working closely with ambitious people, learning how complicated businesses actually work, solving problems across traditional legal boundaries, and building things that make the next problem easier.

Away from the desk, you'll often find me on a bike, near the ocean, reading or writing—and increasingly experimenting with how AI can make professional judgment more useful and accessible without losing the human relationships behind it.

Move fast. Build thoughtfully.

You don't need a large legal department to have sophisticated legal judgment inside the company.

Start with an embedded partner who learns the business, helps the team move, and builds the legal function with you.

Let’s talk about what you’re building. ↗

richard@raa.law