About
Our mission is to give early-stage companies an experienced General Counsel and a working in-house legal team, at a stage of growth when neither should be affordable.
The difference
When you hire a law firm, the work falls on you. You have to know that a legal problem exists. You have to know which specialist to call. Then you have to manage the bill.
Most law firm lawyers have never worked inside a company. They practice a conservative, detailed, and expensive style of lawyering, because that style protects the firm. It is the opposite of what a founder needs from counsel.
LWD works from inside instead. We learn your business. We raise legal matters before they become problems. We integrate at every level of the company. We apply simple and practical approaches to commercial contracting, employment, disputes, and intellectual property.
You get the judgment of a senior in-house lawyer, applied continuously rather than in billable increments.
Founder
Jeff founded LWD Advisors after two decades as a legal and business executive inside the companies his clients are trying to become.
He spent about eight years as a senior member of the legal team at Intel. He led the hardware legal team at Apple, covering industrial design, device engineering and manufacturing, and component procurement. He served as General Counsel at Pebble. At Google he worked in Strategic Deals for consumer hardware, structuring complex agreements for silicon, technology manufacturing, procurement, and licensing. He began his career as a litigator at Cooley LLP.
Jeff teaches Startup Business Lawyering at UC Law San Francisco. He received the Equal Justice Award and the Dorothy M. Wolfe Award for nonprofit legal service, and he serves on the board of Jewish Family and Children's Services of San Francisco.
Education. J.D., Santa Clara University School of Law. B.A. in Economics and Politics, UC Santa Cruz.
How we work
Clients give us company email, Slack, and access to the tools their teams already use. Legal stops being a separate place people have to go.
We attend leadership meetings and Board meetings. Legal risk gets raised while the decision is still open.
A flat monthly fee for the General Counsel function. Hourly only where it belongs. No surprise invoice at the end of a hard month.
Tell me what you are building and where the legal work is piling up. If LWD is not the right answer, I will tell you that and point you somewhere better.