Chris Young, the first general counsel at legal tech firm Ironclad Inc., believes lawyers need to understand the value of taking calculated risks, as he has done much of his career.

When Young is not talking to legal ops groups about how to use metadata to boost a company's revenue, he said he is building Ironclad's legal department from scratch and meeting with other general counsel across the country to "evangelize" about how legal tech can help them.

Young spoke with Corporate Counsel recently in a wide-ranging interview about his career. Here are excerpts from that discussion, edited for clarity and brevity.

Corporate Counsel: Tell me a little about your background and how you got here.

Chris Young: It's a colorful background. I've gone from Big Law [with Morrison & Foerster in San Francisco] into a federal judge clerkship, then into politics, then Department of Justice, back to a law firm [Keker, Van Nest & Peters in San Francisco], and finally in-house in the last few years building legal teams. I've been at Ironclad one year.

CC: What was your first in-house job?

CY: One of the things I am proud of in my career was being a solo lawyer at a sprawling global company called GoFundMe [a for-profit online crowdfunding platform]. When you move from a private law firm and go in-house, you find your legal department is viewed as a cost center and they are often underresourced. I was just reacting all day. But when I installed the Ironclad platform, I was freed up to be able to found the nonprofit affiliate GoFundMe.org [which supports worthy causes such as disaster relief and the #MeToo movement]. I'm a former user, that's why I am passionate about it. That's why I joined the company and am building the legal team from the ground up. About 20% of the company's employees are lawyers, so I wasn't the first. But I am the first general counsel.

CC: Tell me about your belief that legal tech is important to lawyers' mental health.

CY: Research shows that of 100 occupations, lawyers have the highest rate of depression. I am not only on a mission to empower contracts, I'm also on a mission to empower and buoy legal teams generally. Lawyers in-house are expected to do more with less. So legal platforms can free up lawyers to focus on the real substance of legal work, which they will find more fulfilling.

CC: What sort of trends are you seeing in your work?

CY: I am seeing more and more lawyers pivoting into legal ops. At Ironclad we coined a new role: The legal engineer. They are usually recovering lawyers from big law firms. They partner with our new legal department clients and advise on coding and other matters.

CC: Why did you leave your first law practice to join a political campaign?

CY: When I came out of Berkeley Law School, I thought I'd join a law firm, become partner and live happily ever after. Then I was thrown a curveball with [Barack] Obama. I thought he was an amazing individual who had a most compelling message, but not a candidate that was going to win. Then I had a chance to meet him, and before I knew it I was taking a leave of absence to become Obama's deputy finance director in northern California. That was the first time I left what was comfortable for something unknown. I took a calculated risk.

I had no experience at it. I believed in the cause, so I went for it and gave it everything I had. It was one of most beautiful experiences and journeys in my life. When he was elected, I went home and helped the new mayor in Sacramento set up his administration. Then I was appointed to the Department of Justice as associate director of intergovernmental affairs, taking ideas that were working well on the local level and sharing them at the federal level, and taking federal programs and sharing them with mayors and governors.

CC: You believe the political experience worked out well for you. Why?

CY: When I joined the Obama campaign, I was one of his first 40 hires. So it was a startup. When it ended, there were like 6,000. I was part of building an organization, and that experience has translated well to being a startup general counsel. The biggest part of my career that led me to where I am today is my involvement on the Obama campaign.

CC: Did you learn any key lessons in your journey that you can share with other lawyers?

CY: The key lesson I learned was the virtue of taking a calculated risk in your career. Far too often law students are taught explicitly that there are just a couple paths out there for a practitioner: A law firm, the government or a public-interest organization. They're not taught about working in-house. I think the entire profession would benefit if leaders encouraged students and young lawyers not to take well-beaten paths but to take risks, branch out and realize the potential of being a lawyer.