"As the General Counsel of a climate tech company, my team’s work supports the success of our business, which is building virtual power plants that facilitate the transition to 100% clean energy."

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"I am a mission-driven person. I want to be involved with companies that are making products or providing services that provide a benefit to the world. This is incredibly important to me and helps keep me motivated."

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"My company's mission--to discover, develop, and deploy the technologies and enabling government policies necessary to create a carbon pollution-free world by 2050--aligns perfectly with my goals."

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The Kerwin Team has been meeting with legal and compliance leaders and one-off talent about the market, their careers, and our search work. We have continued to drive search work globally in a resource-limited and somewhat "stalled" market. The good news is that companies are continuing to hire and innovation continues in the tech sector. Our overall sense is that there is a bit of an “uptick” but we may not see real traction on legal hiring until the first quarter of 2024. Here are a few top-of-mind insights on the current state of the market.

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“Give me more bad news!” One of the best executives with whom I’ve worked says this to her team in times of constraint You can’t drive as far as you intended if your allotment of gas is cut in half, and her point was the same: where resources are tight, let’s be constantly communicative about the trade-offs and creativities required to arrive at our final destination."

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"I don’t view the fact that an applicant was impacted by layoffs or RIFs as a negative at all; in fact, layoffs almost always flood the market with amazingly talented lawyers. When I joined Verkada last year, we were in that enviable position of hiring in a down market – and we continue to be. And I’m really excited about the amazing people we’ve hired already (in this down market) – and the team we’ve started to build here. I think perhaps the one challenge that presents itself more acutely in a down market is when you are recruiting someone who currently has a job. Even if they don’t love their current job, they are still reluctant to risk a switch in times of economic uncertainty."

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"Growing the Legal team thoughtfully and responsibly is a big part of my job in any market. Decisions about when and whether to hire always comes down to the needs of the business at the time."

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"Otherwise, if your team’s growth is constrained, you may need to have a frank conversation with your business leaders around realistic expectations on service levels. Meaning, it may take a day or two longer to get a question answered, or a contract completed."

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As the founding General Counsel at OpenAI (2017-2021), I was constantly faced with novel issues relating to every stage of AI development and deployment. Much of the law relating to AI was (and remains) unsettled, but drawing on my background in IP law and with the help of others in the industry, I was able to develop some sense of how existing IP principles would be mapped onto the AI landscape and advise OpenAI accordingly.

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My specialty is open source software licensing, an area where I have been building expertise for nearly 30 years. I started out as a general tech transactions lawyer, with an emphasis on software licensing. Because of that, I have always focused on the outer boundaries of copyright protection, such as with open data and hardware licensing. Also, I represented Google in Oracle America v. Google, which went all the way to the Supreme Court and took over 10 years to litigate. When that case

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I'm a legal leader and General Counsel, having worked at Scale AI, Plaid, and Dropbox. I graduated with a BS in Computer Science from the University of Texas at Austin and a JD from Stanford Law School. Recently, I've switched to the investing side as a Partner at Recall Capital, focused on pre-seed investments in AI applications, enterprise SaaS, and fintech.

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I've been counseling AI and machine learning research and development and product deployment for over half a decade. I led the product counsel team at Google supporting Google AI Research and am currently Deputy General Counsel at Anthropic, one of the frontier labs developing large language models but with a core focus on AI safety. The metaphor I'd use to describe the evolution of my career in this space is that of a ripple. At the center--and what drew me to AI before it was popular--is my passion for navigating uncharted legal territory. Over time, my scope and skillset has expanded beyond pure product counseling, but my love of emerging technologies remains at the core.

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I’m a former computer scientist who has always been passionate about machine learning. I’ve been lucky to have worked with AI technologies throughout my legal career. In my current role (Deputy GC at Google DeepMind) I help our researchers work toward their goal of improving AI and using it to advance science and benefit humanity. I lead a team of commercial and IP lawyers who partner closely with our researchers and advise on the various questions and needs that come up in their work. I also lead our Legal Operations team who keep our legal team working at maximum efficiency.

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