Roles

I am an Entrepreneurial Fellow and run a blockchain research lab at CodeX, the Stanford Center for Legal Informatics, and am a founding Editor of the Stanford Journal on Blockchain Law and Policy. 

I hold degrees from the University of Oxford and Stanford University, in history, and law, science, and technology. I completed law school in England and gained 10,000 hours’ experience as a lawyer at an international law firm, before moving to Stanford and Silicon Valley.

I was the founding CEO of Legal.io, building products and services to reinvent the delivery of legal services through technology, and was on the founding team of StartX, the Stanford-affiliated community of serial entrepreneurs, industry experts, tenured Stanford professors, and well-funded growth-stage startups who have collectively raised over $7B in funding since its inception in 2011. I continue to support and advise entrepreneurs, based on warm introductions via StartX and other trusted entrepreneurial communities.

In 2020, I was recognized as a Foresight Fellow in Legal Engineering for the Biosphere, and was also selected for the Edmund Hillary Fellowship, to bridge between New Zealand and the rest of the world as part of furthering my applied research on extitutions and data governance systems to support trusted local and global collaboration. I continue to consult at the intersection of law, technology, and policy, for companies, communities, and government agencies, and to teach at universities and law schools around the world.
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Currently:

  • I am weaving between ecologies, spaces, and stories, exploring regenerative emotional state-craft and stewarding a legal, financial, and data interoperability standards project around climate, eco-coins, and biodiversity oracles and distributed coordination and registry systems, with Mothertree Labs.
  • I offer research, advisory, development, coaching, and facilitation services around governance, entrepreneurship, blockchain, law, and technology, with General Collectives.
  • I’m bridging among a broad coalition of law, public administration, technology, data governance, activism, arts, ecology, humanitarian, and scientific ecosystems, organizations, and individuals, as a co-creator of Forum for Earth:
    • to gather through events like openCOP;
    • to envision more inclusive and decentralized futures; and
    • to act together on solutions to the crisis in climate and biodiversity loss.
  • I’m a PhD candidate at Université Paris-Panthéon-Assas, with CERSA.
  • I’m an editor of the Stanford Journal of Blockchain Law and Policy.
  • I’m an editor of the MIT Computational Law Report, contributing recently with their work on model privacy principles for digital contact tracing applications and services that leverage personal individual location and proximity data to combat COVID-19 (Commentary).
  • I’m co-stewarding a Planetary Health Futures community.
  • I advise Liquidstar on governance and ecosystem development for energy distribution to the 1B people currently unserved by electricity grids.
  • I work with DSIL Global to share practices around culture change, design processes, experiential learning, systems change strategy, and expert facilitation to develop capacity around innovation leadership.
  • I am a Fellow in the Edmund Hillary Fellowship, which brings entrepreneurs and investors together in New Zealand to catalyze positive change for the world.
  • I’m a Fellow at the Blockchain and Fintech Group of the Singapore University of Social Sciences.
  • I’m a co-organizer and creative activist in the global movement of legal hackers.
  • I’m a board member for District Commons, a non-profit with a mission to amplify the emancipatory power of communities to create collective possibilities, supporting an ecosystem of projects nurtured around the Embassy Network, a network of place-based communities experimenting with new forms of governance and solidarity.
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Previously:

  • I co-created with Lawrence Lek the DAO Visualization and Simulation Lab, a project to research, develop, and prototype an open-source framework for creating 2D and 3D visualizations and simulations to enable experiential onboarding to DAOs (See DAOTown.com).
  • I co-curated the Redwood Parliament, held during DWebCamp 2022, a collectively manifested collection of workshops. We gathered to share research and experiences around governance and to learn from the four hundred attendees of this “Retreat in the Redwoods”, organized by the Internet Archive. Our aspirational goal: to create “Governance Layers for the Internet.”
  • I organized an interdisciplinary conference alongside the October 2021 Pre-COP negotiations in Milan, and am gathering symposium submissions for a special issue of the Stanford Journal of Blockchain Law and Policy, focused on Climate Change and New Technologies: Aligning Public Administration and Social Activation around Decentralized Local and Global Solutions, encompassing:
    • Collective Imagining towards New Economic Models of Value
    • The Rights of Nature
    • Green New Deals: Climate Data Policy, Deep ESG Finance, and Interoperability for Polycentric Governance;
    • Citizen Sovereignty, Algorithmic Transparency, and Data Dignity for Equitable Planetary Governance; and
    • Blockchain Standards and Frameworks for Impact.
  • I co-created openCOP, a virtual event space that facilitates exploration, broader ecological awareness and collective solidarities, initiated as an interactive online gathering, envisioning, and sensemaking space, in November 2021, to bridge projects and voices beyond those present in Glasgow to the adjacent potential of decentralized and inclusive futures (mainstage session recordings).
  • I worked with Moral Imaginations on bridging collective imagining practices to governance, legislative, and policy-making contexts.
  • I organized and hosted the Stanford Blockchain Law and Policy Summit 2021.
  • I advised the Institute for the Advancement of the American Legal System (IAALS), an independent research center dedicated to facilitating continuous improvement and advancing excellence in the American legal system.
  • I created a course on Legal Engineering for the Biosphere, which I was invited to teach in January 2021 as part of the University of Hawaii School of Law’s J-Term Social Justice Curriculum (syllabus).
  • I worked with the Ada Lovelace Institute’s Rethinking Data Working Group, co-facilitating workshops and advising the core team on strategy and project management.
  • I recorded the voice-over for a short video about How We Saved the Ozone Layer, for the Future of Life award, which honors those whose overlooked actions have steered humanity from disaster. I later recorded a follow up, covering all 8 recipients of the award.
  • As the COVID-pandemic took hold of the world in April 2020, I organized and hosted Earth2030 at Stanford Law School, an interdisciplinary, online gathering focused on collective sensemaking, knowledge, and skill-sharing around critical digital technologies and their role in supporting global policy-makers and community-leaders, covering legal frameworks for data interoperability around public health and climate action, and the potential role of blockchain infrastructure.
  • I was a Senior Research Fellow at the Centre for Technology, Robotics, AI, and the Law, at the National University of Singapore.
  • I was invited by Ethereum researchers, Vitalik Buterin and Vlad Zamfir, to create and offer alongside them a full-day workshop to members of various Singapore government agencies, on Blockchain regulation and policy.
  • I created and taught, a computational law and blockchain symposium, alongside James Miller, including for Thailand’s Office of the National Broadcaster and Telecommunications Commission and Keio University’s School of Media and Governance.
  • I was a board advisor for the non-profit, Distributed Ledger Foundation.
  • I founded the Blockchain Group at CodeX, the Stanford Center for Legal Informatics.
  • I was founding CEO and raised our first US$3M to build the legal tech and talent network, Legal.io.
  • I was on the board of advisors for the non-profit, Shareable.
  • I was on the founding team of the Stanford-affiliated startup accelerator and community, StartX.
  • I helped create and teach the first legal technology and informatics course at Stanford Law School.
  • I was a teaching fellow to Jonathan Zittrain, Elizabeth Stark, and David Hornik, for a joint Harvard/Stanford interdisciplinary project-based seminar as part of a year-long arc of developing and building “Ideas for a Better Internet”.
  • I was a board member and mentor for the Ashoka Youth Advisory Network.
  • I gained a Masters in Law, Science, and Technology, from Stanford University, with formal studies in Patents, Copyright, IP Advanced Topics – Managing the Information Future, Internet Business Law & Policy, Ideas for a Better Internet, Copyright, Industry & the Internet, Democracy & Constitution, Sovereignty Globalization & Technological Change, Design Thinking, Social Innovation & the Social Entrepreneur, Entrepreneurial Thought Leadership, and Art and the Law. 
  • I was appointed a Fellow at CodeX, the Stanford Center for Legal Informatics.
  • I clocked 10,000 hours as a lawyer, specializing in technology, media, telecoms, intellectual property, privacy, data protection, internet, licensing, outsourcing, general corporate, commercial, emerging companies, and M&A law at the international law firm, Herbert Smith (now Herbert Smith Freehills).
  • I completed my first round of academic and practical legal education with commendation and distinction at a private law school in England, funded by a scholarship from my future employers (with formal studies in: Contract Law, Criminal Law, Constitutional & Administrative Law, Equity & Trusts, EU Law, Land Law, and Tort Law; Business Law & Practice, Civil Litigation, Criminal Litigation, Debt Finance, Equity Finance, Partnership Law, Private Acquisitions, Probate & Administration of Estates, and Property Law & Practice.)
  • I gained a BA and MA (Hons) in Modern History from the University of Oxford, completing my final dissertation in “Accounting for transformation in ritual and belief systems”. Floreat Exon.