corporate-law
(17)
Bryan Koh and the business of changing sides
Before he ran WhiteCoat Global, Bryan Koh worked on other people’s deals. His own story runs through a family partnership, a lawyer’s training and the decision to become the person signing the purchase agreement.
Janie Béïque and the money that stays close to home
From corporate law to the leadership of the Fonds de solidarité FTQ, Janie Béïque has built a career around a demanding proposition: retirement savings should earn a return and help give Quebec a future.
Greenberg Traurig grew big by keeping decisions small
From a Miami deli to 51 locations, Greenberg Traurig built a global law firm around local authority. Its growth offers a useful lesson in delegation - and a costly reminder that trust needs checking.
Edward Donovan and the Art of the Second Career
A West Point graduate moved from Army service to deal law, then crossed the table to help run the pharmaceutical businesses he once advised. His parallel post at Code Platoon brings the journey back to its first chapter.
Atrium Knew Exactly How It Might Fail
The Twitch co-founder raised $75.5 million to make startup law predictable. The warning that undid the experiment was hiding in plain sight - in his own interview.
Procopio Gives Startups a Desk Down the Hall From Their Lawyers
The San Diego law firm has spent decades advising businesses. Its in-house incubator puts it beside founders before the first big financing - while a wider practice handles everything from waterfront deals to a robotic dog petter.
Munger, Tolles & Olson: Small Teams, Billion-Dollar Stakes
The Los Angeles law firm puts experienced lawyers close to consequential problems. Its record shows both the appeal of that approach and the expense of getting a major case across the finish line.
Brian Finrow’s Second Draft of Biotech Starts With Spirulina
A corporate lawyer walked into a spirulina lab and stayed. At Lumen Bioscience, Brian Finrow is testing whether cheaper manufacturing can change not only how biologic drugs are made, but which problems the industry chooses to solve.
Bennett Jones Built a 104-Year Moat Where Canada Gets Complicated
The Calgary-born firm turned resource-law fluency into a national business platform. Its most useful lesson is not to offer everything - it is to earn one difficult wedge, then follow clients into every adjacent problem.
Sotos LLP Built a 46-Year Business on the Fine Print Behind Every Franchise
The Toronto boutique found a narrow door into a very large room: help branded businesses launch, grow, fight and eventually exit. Its advantage is not mystery - it is decades spent learning where a business system tends to crack.
Cassels Stayed in One City for 124 Years. Then Its Clients Wrote the Expansion Plan.
For more than a century, Cassels barely moved from Toronto’s financial core. Its route to becoming a three-office national business firm offers a practical lesson: let client demand choose the map, then redesign the institution around the work.
Sherry A. William
Sherry A. William is the founder and managing attorney of Pacific Ivy Law Group, a Los Angeles-area corporate boutique that pairs Big-Law rigor with what she calls emotional IQ. Harvard Law educated and trained at three top-tier firms in New York and Los Angeles plus a stint in Tokyo, she negotiates deals for companies, individuals, governments, and financial institutions worldwide. Raised by an immigrant single mother in the Egyptian American community, she is fluent in Arabic, licensed to practice law in California and New York, holds real estate broker licenses in both states, and leads the Harvard Law School Association of Los Angeles and the League of Egyptian American Professionals.
John Delfino
John Delfino is Partner and General Counsel at TCV (Technology Crossover Ventures), the Menlo Park-based growth equity firm behind transformative investments in Netflix, Spotify, Airbnb, Facebook, and over 350 technology companies. Joining TCV in 2014 after nearly a decade at elite law firm Simpson Thacher & Bartlett, Delfino sits at the intersection of law and venture capital - structuring deals, executing investments and exits, and managing the full legal and operational footprint of one of tech's most storied growth investors. With a J.D./M.B.A. from Santa Clara University and undergraduate roots at the College of the Holy Cross (including a year abroad at Oxford), he brings a rare dual lens of legal rigor and business strategy to a firm that has backed category-defining companies since 1995.
Ryan Thompson
Ryan Thompson is General Counsel and Partner at Felicis, a Menlo Park-based venture capital firm that has backed over 50 unicorns and raised a $900M Fund X in 2025. A lawyer-turned-operator-turned-investor, Ryan brings nearly two decades of legal and operational muscle to one of Silicon Valley's most decorated early-stage firms. Before Felicis, he served as COO and General Counsel at Unusual Ventures and as General Counsel and VP of HR at Shape Security — which sold to F5 Networks for over $1 billion. He spent nine years as a corporate attorney at Goodwin Procter and DLA Piper, working on VC financings, M&A, and IPOs before crossing the table to the operator side.
Stephan Eberle
Stephan Eberle is the General Counsel and Head of Limited Partner Relations at Scale Venture Partners, a Foster City-based early-stage venture capital firm managing $2.8 billion in assets. A Berkeley- and UC Hastings-trained attorney, he spent 17 years at Silicon Valley Bank building its global legal infrastructure and founding its venture capital investing program before joining Scale VP in 2016. He now oversees fund and portfolio legal matters while serving as the primary liaison between the firm and its limited partners.
Julia Vasconcelos
Julia Vasconcelos is Sr. Director of Strategy & Operations and Chief of Staff to the CEO at Typeface, the enterprise generative AI platform backed by Lightspeed, GV, and Salesforce Ventures. A Brazilian attorney-turned-operator who pivoted from M&A law to fintech at Stone (where she helped drive the company's Nasdaq IPO), then earned an MS at Stanford GSB before landing at one of AI's hottest unicorns. She co-led Brazil at Silicon Valley, built a community of 200k in two months, and now sits at the intersection of AI strategy and executive operations in Palo Alto.
Carolynn Levy
Carolynn Levy is Managing Director of Legal and Partner at Y Combinator, the world's most successful startup accelerator. She revolutionized early-stage venture capital by creating the SAFE (Simple Agreement for Future Equity) in 2013, a five-page document that replaced complex convertible notes and now powers roughly 90% of pre-seed deals. Before joining YC in 2012, she spent over a decade at Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati representing Silicon Valley startups and investors. Working alongside her husband Jon Levy, YC co-founder Jessica Livingston, and CFO Kirsty Nathoo, she has guided thousands of founders through legal fundamentals and helped shape the modern startup funding landscape.