Loading...
Director and Senior Managing Counsel - Oyster HR, Inc.
finding the through line is my (professional) everything
Lawyer since 2012. Trained in litigation, wired for systems. I started as a law clear at the South Carolina Supreme Court clerkship and, subsequently, as a litigator and trial lawyer for the next five years. From that experience, I know how decisions actually get made under pressure. Then I shifted from practicing inside the system to rethinking it: founding a lawyer coworking space, digging into law practice mechanics, and getting obsessed with how legal workflows scale (or don’t). In-house, I’ve applied that lens across both risk and revenue. I’ve managed litigation for a regional mortgage brokerage and now lead commercial and product go-to-market legal at a venture-backed HR tech company, helping build the legal infrastructure that has supported growth from $8M to $100M ARR. I operate in the gaps between legal, product, and revenue, where ambiguity is high and leverage matters. I push past artificial constraints, but not for the sake of it, only where it drives better systems, cleaner decisions, and faster outcomes. I’m most engaged when the problem is complex, the path isn’t obvious, and the answer needs to be built: not found.
Here's the problem it solves: Work doesn't start in a ticketing system. It starts in a Slack message, a Teams thread, an email chain, and every time we ask someone to stop that conversation and go somewhere else to submit a request, we lose context, completeness, and goodwill. The best in-house attorneys win on relationships. So why do we create friction at the exact moment someone reaches out for help? The data problem is just as real. Legal teams sit on valuable intelligence, such as intake patterns, recurring risks, and resolution rates, but it's scattered across Asana, Zendesk, Notion, and memory. So instead of advising the business, we're aggregating spreadsheets. One intake. Full visibility. Zero duplicate entry. One Slack message triggers a tracked matter, routed automatically across legal sub-departments. AI reads each intake and gets smarter every time a human corrects it. Privilege controls are attorney-gated. Search surfaces an AI-generated counsel brief before you renengage. Every action, from routing, reassignment, notes, and status changes are logged with actor and timestamp. Clean data. No friction. Structured reporting designed specifically for in-house legal, so you stop chasing information and start using it