She practiced securities law in Moscow and energy law in Beijing. Then she quit to make the courts' worst software bearable.
PACER is the electronic records system for the United States federal courts. Lawyers depend on it the way cities depend on water mains, and roughly with the same enthusiasm. It is slow, it charges by the page, and the documents arrive named things like 3:21-cv-04823-doc14.pdf. Anna McGrane built a company whose entire reason for existing is to make that experience disappear.
She is co-founder and CEO of PacerPro, a San Francisco company that started life in 2014 as a simple overlay on PACER and grew into the standard way BigLaw pulls court data into its knowledge systems. When a filing hits a docket, PacerPro grabs it, renames it sensibly, tags the metadata, drops it into the firm's document management system, and tells the right people it arrived. Nobody has to babysit the docket at 11 p.m. The software runs inside nearly half of the Am Law 100.
McGrane did not arrive here through a computer science degree. She arrived through Russian securities law, a brother's phone call, and a conference in Texas she almost skipped.
By 2014 McGrane had a tidy international-law career. She had practiced as a corporate and capital markets associate at Herbert Smith Freehills out of its Moscow office, and worked with the NRDC in Beijing on energy regulation. The plan was to keep going. Her brother Gavin, who was building a little tool to tame PACER, invited her to a legal conference in Texas instead of flying back to Beijing.
She watched users react to the product, and the international-law plan quietly evaporated. As she put it later: "I just couldn't leave." She joined as VP of sales and marketing, became co-founder and chief operating officer, and eventually took the chief executive seat.
There are many days when I miss the predictability of the law firm track. But the reality is, the things I have loved most in my life came from opportunities that arose along the way.- Anna McGrane, on leaving the firm track
The law was not a mid-life discovery. By her own account, McGrane read her first legal brief at the age of 12 and held her first law job at 18. She went to UC Berkeley and studied Biology and Russian, with a minor in Spanish, which is a combination that already hints at someone who refuses to pick a single lane. Then came NYU School of Law, where she graduated in 2010 and joined the Jacobson Leadership Program in Law and Business, edited the journal of environmental law, and volunteered at a family-law nonprofit.
She added an LLM in Chinese law from Peking University, and later, after the PacerPro pivot, went through Fullstack Academy of Code so the CEO of a software company would actually understand what her engineers were arguing about. Five languages in total. The thread running through all of it is not law or code. It is the willingness to keep learning the next dialect, legal or literal.
The hard part of legal tech is rarely the technology. It is convincing partners at conservative firms to alter a workflow they have used for thirty years. McGrane talks openly about consultative selling and about hearing "no," which is a polite way of describing the daily reality of enterprise change management in an industry that bills by the hour and distrusts anything new.
Her answer has been patience plus proof. "Every time you have a success, you get a little bit of a louder voice," she has said. PacerPro grew firm by firm, win by win, until adoption inside the Am Law 100 became the argument itself.
Once firms trusted PacerPro with federal filings, they asked the obvious question: can you do this for state courts too? State courts are a swamp of incompatible systems with no single PACER to overlay, which is precisely why it is a hard, valuable problem. In 2021 the company raised a $5 million round led by Berkley Capital, brought on a new CTO, and began expanding coverage starting with California and New York, with plans to march through the top legal markets.
Ask McGrane where this points and the answer drifts back toward the environment. She has described her law degree as a problem-solving tool for society's biggest challenges, and has spoken about wanting to put it toward environmental work someday. The journal she edited at NYU was the environmental one. The Beijing work was on energy regulation. For now the problem in front of her is the docket, and she is winning it.
Reads her first legal brief at twelve. Lands her first law job at eighteen. The law was never plan B.
Graduates NYU School of Law. Jacobson Leadership Program; staff editor on the environmental law journal.
Corporate associate at Herbert Smith Freehills in Moscow; energy regulatory work with the NRDC in Beijing.
A conference in Texas instead of a flight to Beijing. Joins PacerPro as VP of sales & marketing. "I just couldn't leave."
Named a Fastcase 50 honoree and featured in Legaltech News' Women of Legal Tech.
Co-founds the NYU Law & Tech community; serves as co-founder and COO of PacerPro.
PacerPro raises $5M led by Berkley Capital, hires a new CTO, and expands into state courts (CA, NY).
Serves as CEO and co-founder, scaling court-data automation across the top legal markets.
"Don't pay too much attention to titles. Focus on opportunities where you are contributing to something that matters to you."
"Every time you have a success, you get a little bit of a louder voice."
"I just couldn't leave."
"What's really different about NYU is the community."
She speaks five languages. The Russian came before the law; the law came before the code.
Her co-founder is her brother, Gavin McGrane, who is also a Fastcase 50 honoree. A family in the docket business.
She studied Biology at Berkeley before swapping cells for statutes.
No formal tech background. She enrolled at Fullstack Academy of Code anyway, so she could talk to her own engineers.
First legal brief read at twelve. First law job at eighteen. Precocious does not begin to cover it.
Holds an LLM in Chinese law from Peking University and once advised on energy regulation in Beijing.