Grammarly Finds Its First General Counsel
Virginia Badenhope, now the sole member of Grammarly's legal department, is expected to have an "organizational vision and plan in place" and hire two in-house lawyers by the end of her first year.
June 03, 2019 at 03:07 PM
3 minute read
The original version of this story was published on The Recorder
Virginia Badenhope, general counsel of Grammarly Inc.
Grammarly Inc. has hired Virginia Badenhope, an in-house lawyer with a history of working for California-based tech businesses, as its first general counsel, the writing app company announced Monday.
Badenhope joins Grammarly at its San Francisco headquarters after having served for nearly seven years as deputy GC of enterprise software company Atlassian Corp. She oversaw the commercial, privacy and intellectual property functions of the firm's legal department.
Founded in 2009, Grammarly uses artificial intelligence-based software to detect grammar, spelling, punctuation, word choice and style mistakes in writing. The company, which reports that it has more than 20 million daily active users, dealt with a security vulnerability last year that threatened to expose customer data.
Badenhope, now the sole member of Grammarly's legal department, is expected to have an “organizational vision and plan in place” and hire two in-house lawyers by the end of her first year.
She wrote in an email that she understands the “value of teamwork having spent the last seven years at a collaboration software company.” She added she was “inspired by Grammarly's focus on empathy as the foundation for effective communication. I look forward to building the legal function at Grammarly in line with the company's strong values.”
In her first in-house role, Badenhope had a short stint as a contract corporate counsel for Veritas Software Corp., which later merged with Symantec Corp. She went on to serve as associate GC at another California-based software company, BigFix Inc., which IBM Corp. bought in 2010.
She was involved in the IBM deal, which integrated BigFix products into the IBM Tivoli Software portfolio. Afterward, she served as senior attorney at Tivoli from January 2011 to August 2012, when she joined Atlassian, according to her LinkedIn profile.
Earlier in her career, Badenhope had stints as an associate at Mintz, Levin, Cohn, Ferris, Glovsky and Popeo and Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati and as a senior associate at Smithline Jha, a boutique firm in San Francisco that represents tech companies. She is a graduate of Stanford University and Boston College Law School.
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