Introducing the Ironclad Community

Newsletter Edition №1

This week at Ironclad, we’re launching a new newsletter for our community: the customers and friends who make the work we do fulfilling and meaningful. In this first edition, our CEO, Jason Boehmig, explains what “community” means to us and why we’d like you to be a part of it.

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Hello from Vegas: Cladiators and our friends, Chris (@gofundme) and Elise (@hoteltonight). #CLOC2018 #LegalOps #legaltech #cloc #lasvegas #conference #picoftheday #photooftheday #selfiesunday

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Letter from the CEO

Dear friends and colleagues,

Two weeks ago, my team and I flew to Las Vegas to attend this year’s annual CLOC conference. It was only the second time we’d been to CLOC, and only the third US Institute in CLOC’s history, but it already felt like a gathering of old friends.

When we went last year, Ironclad had a tiny booth in the back of the Bellagio conference hall. (We brought Philz coffee with us, so we still managed to draw traffic 😊.) A lot has changed since then. This year, we were front and center at CLOC as Platinum sponsors. We were proud to be in the company of so many great tech solutions, legal teams, and law firms. We were proud to contribute to a legal ecosystem comprising so many individuals who care deeply about legal.

It was a compelling reminder of why we exist as a company: to empower legal teams to solve problems that only you can solve for your organizations, to be changemakers and legal leaders.

If you’re reading this, you know that at Ironclad, we build software. But software is just 0s and 1s. On the other side of all those 0s and 1s is people. You need people to enact change, to organize the 0s and 1s into valuable tools that respond to real questions affecting humanity.

Which is why at Ironclad, we’re not just interested in building software. We’re also interested in building community: people connecting to people, face to face. We’re interested in kindling relationships and connecting with people — empowering legal through the power of human connection.

We are inviting you to join us on a collective mission: to build a community to empower legal professionals — lawyers, legal operations professionals, paralegals — to advance your careers, meet and form real connections with other brilliant people in legal, learn from and about each other, and grow.

We’ll be hosting events like quarterly Community Dinners, Rooftop Law School sessions (with MCLE credit!), and growth workshops around leadership and diversity. More information to come, but in the meantime, we’d love to hear about what programming you’d be interested in. Let us know your thoughts here.

You can also expect to receive monthly newsletters in your inbox with events and helpful resources from Vera Devera-Dalrymple, our Community Builder.

We look forward to seeing you at an Ironclad Community Event soon!

Jason Boehmig, CEO and Co-Founder

Member Spotlight

Chris Young, General Counsel of GoFundMe

This month, we’re shining a light on Chris Young, General Counsel of GoFundMe. He draws on his years of experience as a corporate attorney and public servant to help shape and carry out the strategic vision of the company.

Chris spent most of his career between private law practice, politics and government. After law school, he worked as a litigator at the San Francisco-based law firm, Morrison Foerster. After litigating a high-profile educational inequality case, he took a leave of absence to join the 2008 Obama campaign as the Deputy Finance Director of Northern California. After President Obama was elected, Chris returned to his hometown, Sacramento, to serve as then-Mayor Kevin Johnson’s Senior Advisor and Counsel, before moving to DC to serve in the Obama Administration. After a short stint in both the White House and U.S. Department of Justice, Chris moved back to the Bay Area and joined the law firm of Keker & Van Nest. There, he served as a litigator and trial lawyer, handling a wide range of criminal, civil, and regulatory cases. After four years at KVN, Chris left to join OpenGov and served as its head of business development and counsel.

Chris received a degree in Philosophy from San Diego State University, where he graduated magna cum laude. After spending a year as a fellow in the California State Senate, he started working on his law degree at UC Berkeley School of Law, where he graduated in 2005. He currently lives in Oakland with his wife and young son.

Events Calendar

Rooftop Law is back next Thursday, May 17, from 5:30 to 7 p.m. at the Ironclad office! With Sprint and T-Mobile’s recent announcement to merge, legal engineer Matt Thanalaban will cover the basics and notable cases for antitrust laws. Save your spot now.

What is Rooftop Law School? It’s an Ironclad tradition dating back to (that one time when) we gathered a group of our friends together on the roof of our building to nerd out over the legal issues of the day. Since then, it’s evolved into an informal gathering of lawyers and non-lawyers alike discussing a legal case over beers, wines, and snacks. In the past, we’ve discussed everything from monkeys taking selfies to software patents to haunted houses. We always end up meeting new people and learning fascinating things.

You definitely don’t need a law degree to enjoy Rooftop Law, but if you’re a lawyer you can get CLE credit for your attendance!

P.S. If you’re a lawyer and have an interesting case you’d like to discuss, please reach out to vera@ironcladapp.com!

Resources

If you’re a legal operations professional, check out Mary O’Carroll’s CLOC closing speech and find out how you can “be the spark” at your organization.

We are working on building a Jobs list as part of this monthly newsletter. For now, we recommend you check out Jobs by TechGC, a private, curated newsletter for attorneys aspiring to work in-house in the world’s leading venture-backed technology companies and firms. Subscribe to the list.

To help ignite change at your organization, we created a free toolkit you can download including: (1) Project Plan Template for Managing Your CMS Vendor, (2) RFP Questions for Assessing CMS Adoption, and (3) a Business Center Rubric, a legal operations audit tool.