Peter Katz started daydreaming about quitting his job in Big Law his first month on the job. Specifically, how long it would take him to pay back his student loans if he quit now and went back to teaching high school.
Peter didn't quit then. But he did leave the firm in his fourth year, well before he had the chance to get sucked onto the partner track. For Peter, it came down to a question that he couldn’t answer as a Big Law attorney: what is this work for?
“I knew we were busy,” Peter said. “I knew I had a lot of partners and senior associates to answer to. I knew I stayed up all night at times for reasons that were unbeknownst to me. But I never quite made that connection between the work and the value that it was providing to our clients.”
Peter jumped at the opportunity to leave Big Law for an in-house role at Vanguard, where he learned valuable business and people management skills. In the two decades since, Peter has found his niche in building legal functions that support hypergrowth.
As the first general counsel and in-house lawyer at Duo Security, he helped guide the company through a $2.4 billion acquisition by Cisco, in a complex dual-track IPO and acquisition process. Now Peter leads legal at Expel, a cybersecurity company that offers Managed Detection and Response (MDR) for enterprises. The throughline of Peter’s career has been relationships first, intellectual honesty always, and the confidence to say "I don't know" when necessary.
The Shift from Big Law Lawyer to In-House Counsel
At Vanguard, Peter immediately saw the real impact of his day-to-day work. Every day he traveled from building to building across a campus-sized operation, met with real clients, and completed ordinary commercial work like software agreements, partnership deals, and 529 plans. Shockingly, he loved it. The purpose of the work was always clearly visible.
"I could see where I fit into the picture of why this was important for the client,” Peter said. “Sit down with your clients, make sure they know you as a human, so that when you have pushback, it's not just a lawyer saying no. It's Peter, who I've gone to lunch with.”
Vanguard also taught Peter valuable people management skills he didn’t get at his Big Law role. He learned that leadership is a skill you have to build deliberately, not a personality trait you’re born with. Lawyers who treat it as the former, he'd later learn, are the ones who end up with great teams and thriving careers.
Note from CZ: Peter learned early what takes most in-house lawyers years to discover: CFOs don't lead with "I'm an accountant." They lead with their skillset. The moment you stop leading with "I'm a lawyer" is often when you become most useful to your company.
How to Hit the Ground Running as a Startup General Counsel
Peter has been the first in-house lawyer at an org twice in his career, first at Duo and later at Expel. For him, success as a first legal hire turns on being operational.
"I'm good at accepting that I don't know the capital-L legal answer to every legal question,” Peter said. “That's the part I enjoy: making sure we understand what we're deciding together."
He starts by finding what's been built, absorbing the legal noise that's slowing the business down, and giving people their time back so they can focus on their jobs. Then, Peter says, build the processes as you go.
Peter’s Checklist for a General Counsel / Chief Legal Officer's First 90 Days:
Audit what exists: most founding teams have done more than you'd expect
Give business leaders their time back by absorbing the commercial friction
Start enablement with sales, where the pressure is highest
Build legal processes as you go, not before you understand the culture
Hire lawyers with real growth potential
A $2.4B Acquisition and Learning the Art of “I Don’t Know”
Peter joined Duo in January 2015, after crafting a sticky note listing three startups he'd been tracking. Two had already been crossed out, so he joined Duo. By October 2018, Cisco had acquired the third for nearly $2.4 billion.
Getting to that finish line meant running IPO prep and M&A simultaneously. Peter had never led an IPO in-house before, and he was very honest with his leadership about that. He started by laying out exactly what would be required, and earned the board's confidence along the way.
"The biggest mistake in-house lawyers make is pretending to know something they don't,” Peter said. “People are relying on what you say as truth." The deal closed, and the joint success brought his team closer than ever.
Building Legal Teams That Train Tomorrow’s GCs
Four of the seven lawyers who reported to Peter at Duo went on to become C-level executives at other organizations. One became a chief people officer. This is the direct result of Peter’s strategic hiring philosophy. He hires beyond the current level of the role. Instead he looks at the person's ceiling. Does this candidate have what it takes to become a powerhouse General Counsel?
"If the resume gets to me, I assume the person can do the job,” Peter said. “It's all the other stuff that really matters."
What Peter looks for in New Legal Hires:
High growth potential
Genuine customer obsession
Leadership skills and emotional maturity
Comfort with ambiguity and not having all the answers
Intellectual honesty, and no ego
The result of this hiring philosophy is a team that scales easily, retains exceptional talent, and produces tomorrow’s powerhouse GCs.
Note from CZ: One of my mentors, Reggie Davis, former GC of DocuSign and now GC of Epic Games, talks about his "GC count", or the number of direct reports who went on to hold the top legal seat somewhere else. It's one of the most meaningful measures of legal leadership I know, and Peter nails this.
AI, Cybersecurity, and the Gift of Time
Peter's view on AI is more measured than most because works inside a cybersecurity company that uses the product it sells. Peter spends a lot of time thinking about where new technology adds value versus where it just adds noise. He's not going to tell you AI changes everything, but it will change the legal field in a big way.
"If you looked at a pie chart of your day and asked how much time was spent doing human lawyering work that needed you, for most in-house lawyers there's a good chunk where sophisticated software could do it as well, and faster,” Peter said.
Peter's advice is to use legal AI to offload the work that doesn’t actually require a JD, so you can focus on the work that does need your human expertise, like risk calculations, hiring calls, and board advisement. Focus on building relationships across the company that will serve you later. All of your high-impact work gets better when you're not buried under grunt work.
Doug Mandel, first GC of LinkedIn, calls this ‘the gift of time.’ Peter calls it getting back to the work that requires you. Whatever you call it, GC AI can help you get there.
In-house lawyers like you save time on research, contract review and redlining, and legal research, so they have more time to get back to the work that matters. Try GC AI free today!
