business
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Digital commodity token listings under the draft market structure bill
Listing a crypto token on a major exchange can catapult a token from obscurity to highly valuable.But exchanges’ vetting process for new tokens is a legal minefield. Exchanges’ listing decisions were at the crux of several SEC enforcement actions by the previous administration (notably against Coinbase, Binance, and Kraken) that were settled by the current
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When founders hire employees in their own image.
I was approached by a recruiter for a founding Legal Counsel role at a cool AI startup. At first glance it was a real rocket-ship: just raised a Series B, growing headcount and ARR, and allegedly profitable. But there were some glaring red flags: The JD was looking for someone with 1-3 years’ experience (and
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Small vendors are not at a negotiation disadvantage
Small vendors are NOT at a negotiation disadvantage opposite large enterprise customers.Let me explain. By the time the contract gets to the lawyers to negotiate, the customer has usually put a lot of effort into searching, testing, and selecting the vendor. They’ve already made a purchase decision (unless this is an RFP or competitive bid
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My Risk Map for B2B Companies
Startup CEOs, founders, and entrepreneurs make decisions about legal risks all the time, and in-house legal leaders need to decide where to spend their time and effort to lower the most risk. Legal risks are hard to predict and quantify, and managing them often falls back on gut heuristics rather than hard data.Here’s my gut
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One of the most underappreciated legal AI tools? Slack.
One of the most underappreciated legal AI tools?Slack. A simple Slack workflow I built in my last in-house job was game changer. I was tasked with reviewing marketing materials for compliance with our legal policies. The marketing team would submit several pieces of marketing a day in a marketing <> legal Slack channel. Making the
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Wondering if you should hire a fractional GC? Let’s do the numbers.
Wondering if you should hire a fractional GC?Let’s do the numbers. You’re a tech founder gaining traction. You want protective product terms and a privacy notice. You’re negotiating a strategic agreement on the customer’s paper, and received minor redlines from three other customers on your template, and have a steady stream of NDA. Your engineers
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Not all stock tokenization is the same
The devil is hiding in Footnote 2.Last week, the crypto/legal community celebrated the OCC’s new guidance on capital treatment of tokenized securities. Basically, the bank regulator said that banks can treat tokenized securities the same as securities.But there’s a “but”. Footnote 2 clarifies: “2 Tokenized securities that do not confer legal rights identical to those
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A lawyer is kind of like a doctor
“A lawyer is kind of like a doctor – you listen to clients’ problems with empathy, help them frame the problem correctly, offer alternatives, and provide the confidence to follow the right course of action without deciding for them.” This is what my dad, a retired physician of many years, said to me recently. These
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Entrepreneurs who avoiding hiring in-house counsel – I feel your pain
Entrepreneurs who avoid hiring your first in-house counsel – who hurt you?In recent months I’ve been on multiple interviews with founders for their first full-time or fractional legal counsel who evinced visible scars from past experiences with lawyers. Their negative experiences fall into similar buckets: 1. The self-sufficient entrepreneur — This type is confident reading
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When should VC’s nudge founders to hire counsel
I get it, VCs, you don’t like to meddle in portfolio companies’ operations. But sometimes you need to nudge founders to hire a fractional GC. Here are some signs: 1. It is obvious that the company isn’t having a lawyer look at highly visible materials, and the company website has poorly-written or error-filled terms of service,