Why I Joined Kodex

In August, I joined Kodex as its first in-house General Counsel. I came from Holland & Knight, where Kodex was a client and I spent the better part of a year working with the company's incredible leadership. By the time the conversation turned to joining, I had watched this team work firsthand for months.

In 2008, I joined the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. The agency was about three years old, and much of it still needed to be built: the processes, the relationships, and the legal frameworks for problems no one had confronted before. ODNI was the government's version of a start-up, and the people drawn to it wanted to build. I spent the next seventeen years in the intelligence community and at the FBI, leading teams that ranged from 3 people to 350. Kodex has that same early-days energy. I get to help lay a foundation from scratch, and I find that invigorating in a way that is hard to overstate.

The problem drew me in as much as the team did. Matt left a career at the FBI because legal process for data still ran on fax machines while everything else in an investigation had gone digital. I recognized every part of that story from my side of the table. Speed is critical to a law enforcement investigation. When lawful requests stall, leads go cold, suspects go unidentified, and crimes go unsolved. Kodex helps investigations move at the speed the mission requires, and I saw the benefit to law enforcement the first time I understood what the company had built.

What kept me interested was a feature of the design that is easy to overlook. The same infrastructure that moves a request also verifies it. Every requester is verified, and companies have additional tools to scrutinize every legal demand on the front end. That means companies are not handing over data in response to invalid or overbroad requests, and the people whose data is at stake receive the protection the process owes them. My entire career has run along that line: making lawful access work while protecting privacy and civil liberties. FBI leadership would frequently emphasize the importance of doing the right thing, in the right way, and for the right reason. Kodex has built that standard into its infrastructure, a network designed to confirm that every request meets it.

Trust is what makes the exchange work, and it matters to every party: the agency that needs the data, the provider that holds it, and the person it describes. Each of them has to be able to rely on the process. A general counsel typically supports a single institution. My role at Kodex is broader. I am supporting Kodex, and I am also helping to protect the integrity of an exchange that thousands of institutions depend on. That is the same commitment I have carried since 2008, in a new form.

And the exchange keeps growing. Each of us produces more digital records every day, and the companies holding that data now extend well beyond the traditional technology and social media companies to include hospitality, financial services, health care, insurance, retail, and media. The demand for this information is not limited to criminal investigations. Kodex has only begun to address it.

What does a company's first General Counsel actually do? Some of it looks like any GC role. Much of it is building: the legal function, the compliance posture, the relationships with regulators and law enforcement partners, and the internal habits that allow a company in a consequential space to grow without cutting corners. Matt says he hired me for my gray hair and experience. I have considerably more experience than hair, so I understand the emphasis.

This is my first startup and my first fully remote job, after a career spent inside some of the most tradition-bound institutions in American government. When I left public service, I wondered whether I would find a way to continue supporting the mission from the private sector. I have found one. If you are on either side of this network, as an agency or as a provider, I would like to hear what is working for you and what is not.