Crypto mogul CZs attorney starting own firm and AI will play a major role in its business model

Lawyers are worried that AI will end the need for lawyers, but one of the nation’s top legal minds on crypto believes it’s going to help the boutique firm she’s launching.Teresa Goody Guillén – whose clients include Binance’s billionaire founder Changpeng Zhao, known as CZ –  has stepped down as the head of Baker & Hostetler’s crypto practice to start her own, On The Money has learned. Goody Guillen has named the firm “Bellementis.” It’s a mashup of the word “beautiful” and “mind,” a name she believes captures the essence of what AI can amplify in the legal profession: Allow smart lawyers like her to farm out the necessary scut work of research to the so-called language models, while she and her team spends more time on high-level strategic analysis.She tells On The Money her vision for her firm and her own proprietary AI legal platform began taking shape after she weathered punishing stretches working complex cases, grinding as long as 48 hours without sleep.She figured there had to be a better way.So she tapped into her contacts in the tech-savvy crypto businesses, and began to look at how emerging technologies could be integrated into a sophisticated legal practice.“Much of the legal industry is still treating AI as an overlay on top of traditional workflows,” she tells On The Money.

“But sophisticated legal work requires entirely different infrastructure, quality controls, and operational design.The real opportunity isn’t replacing lawyers, it’s enabling exceptional lawyers to operate more efficiently and strategically at scale.”Goody Guillén is a pioneer of sorts in the legal profession’s embrace of crypto, I should point out.

She began her career as a securities lawyer in the “trad-fi” sense working at the Securities and Exchange Commission and later as the chief operating officer of Kalorama Partners.That’s the boutique law firm started by the late Harvey Pitt, a legal legend who for decades represente...