In-house leader and former Microsoft Corp. lawyer Jessica Nguyen is making a career out of helping tech startups build legal departments. 

After having served as the first-ever top lawyer for software company Avalara Inc. and compensation data firm PayScale Inc., Nguyen has joined Seattle-based Lexion as chief legal officer of the artificial intelligence-powered contract management startup. 

"This is not my first rodeo as the first attorney hired for a tech company," Nguyen said in an interview. 

But her latest role is unique in that she's not focused primarily on traditional general counsel or in-house attorney functions.

Instead, she's using her legal department experience to help guide and shape Lexion's product development in an increasingly competitive field. AI-based contract management has piqued the interest of a growing number in-house lawyers, though many legal departments have been slow to embrace the technology.  

Lexion was founded in 2018 at the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, a creation of Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen. Last year, the company secured a $4.2 million investment from venture capital firm Madrona Venture Group and Silicon Valley law firm Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati. 

As the CLO and sole in-house lawyer at Lexion, Nguyen said her mission is to work closely with the company's executives and engineers to build and shape an AI-based contract management "product that legal teams actually need and love to use to solve real business pain points."

She added, "At the core of what I've learned over time is that I'm a builder. Coming into these companies as the first top lawyer gives me a chance to build something. That is the most fun part of my job." 

Even during her time at Microsoft, Nguyen was a product-focused lawyer who worked alongside an engineering team to help build and maintain Microsoft Outlook.

Aside from a desire to create, chief lawyers for startups tend to have three core characteristics, according to Nguyen: 

  • "You've got to be resourceful. You're inevitably going to have to wear many hats. You're going to be asked to do many tasks and oftentimes you've never done them before."
  • "You need to be adaptable to change. Oftentimes with these startups, they're moving really fast and experimenting. Sometimes those experiments don't work out. They pivot. They change their business priorities and product plans. And you need to be able to be OK with that and pivot with the business and adapt to that change." 
  • "You need to be unflappable. It is a chaotic environment and something will not go right. That is inevitable. You need to be calm under crisis and very solution-focused. Find a solution and move forward." 

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