Crypto mogul CZ’s attorney starting own firm — and AI will play a major role in its business model | Latest Tech News
Lawyers are apprehensive that AI will end the need for attorneys, but one of the nation’s top legal minds on crypto believes it’s going to help the boutique firm she’s launching.
Teresa Goody Guillén – whose shoppers embrace Binance’s billionaire founder Changpeng Zhao, identified as CZ – has stepped down as the top of Baker & Hostetler’s crypto observe to start her own, On The Money has realized.
Goody Guillen has named the firm “Bellementis.” It’s a mashup of the phrase “beautiful” and “mind,” a identify she believes captures the essence of what AI can amplify in the legal occupation: Allow sensible attorneys like her to farm out the mandatory scut work of research to the so-called language fashions, while she and her crew spends more time on high-level strategic analysis.
Lawyers are apprehensive that AI will end the need for attorneys. But Teresa Goody Guillén is betting on AI as she begins her own firm. Jack Forbes / NY Post Design
She tells On The Money her imaginative and prescient for her firm and her own proprietary AI legal platform started taking form after she weathered punishing stretches working complicated circumstances, grinding as long as 48 hours without sleep.
She figured there had to be a better approach. So she tapped into her contacts in the tech-savvy crypto companies, and started to look at how rising applied sciences may very well be built-in into a refined legal observe.
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“Much of the legal industry is still treating AI as an overlay on top of traditional workflows,” she tells On The Money. “But sophisticated legal work requires entirely different infrastructure, quality controls, and operational design. The real opportunity isn’t replacing lawyers, it’s enabling exceptional lawyers to operate more efficiently and strategically at scale.”
Goody Guillén is a pioneer of kinds in the legal occupation’s embrace of crypto, I ought to level out. She started her profession as a securities lawyer in the “trad-fi” sense working at the Securities and Exchange Commission and later as the chief working officer of Kalorama Partners.
That’s the boutique law firm began by the late Harvey Pitt, a legal legend who for a long time represented top white-collar defendants (Ivan Boesky was one of his shoppers) as nicely as serving as SEC chair under George W Bush.
Her shoppers embrace Binance’s billionaire founder Changpeng Zhao, who was pardoned by President Trump. Getty Images
Goody Guillén labored with the late Harvey Pitt, who served as SEC chairman. Getty Images
Back in 2015 and while working with Pitt, Goody Guillén was more and more fielding requests from top digital asset executives about how to deal with regulators who have been skeptical about crypto. That skepticism lasted for years, and Goody Guillén constructed a observe on how to keep crypto varieties from falling to the market’s top cops.
Of current observe, she represented CZ in his profitable request for a pardon from President Trump, first highlighted on these pages, over a single rely of violating the Bank Secrecy Act that led to a four-month jail time period.
She joined Baker & Hostetler in 2019, she says, and largely constructed the digital asset observe from scratch. That’s one motive why she thinks she will be able to pull off creating a tech-forward firm on her own. The other motive is that she believes she and her crew — so far over half a dozen attorneys and advisers — can maintain their own because now they’ve AI on their aspect.
“Law is a craft we need to protect,” she says. “The problem is you don’t want to outsource critical and strategic thinking, judgment, or nuanced legal analysis to these generic AI tools built as superficial overlays on general-purpose technology. That’s why I came up with my own system designed to enhance sophisticated legal work and my own approach in using it.”
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