Molly Abraham, VP of Legal at Coinbase, will tell you that the most effective CLOs and GCs are great business people who happen to have a legal background.
"The most effective CLOs, GCs, you name it, are those that are great business people who happen to have a legal toolkit," she says.
Molly began her career as a product development engineer at Proctor and Gamble working on Pampers. Turns out, modern diapers involve more IP strategy than most law school courses.
“I always knew I wanted to be a lawyer. I really did,” Molly said. “Math and science was something that I also was really drawn to, but the pull towards being a lawyer was stronger. And I originally thought I wanted to be a patent lawyer. And I thought there's no better way to get hands-on experience than to go and actually be an engineer.”
Molly saved for law school by teaching LSAT courses at night after her day job at P&G. After graduating from the University of Chicago Law School, she spent six years at Wachtell Lipton working on multi-billion dollar litigations and SEC investigations, then went in-house at Kitty Hawk, the flying car company backed by Larry Page.
Since joining Coinbase in 2021, Molly has grown the legal team from two to 90 in one of the most scrutinized regulatory periods the tech industry has experienced.
GC AI founder Cecilia Ziniti met Molly through L Suite, where she gave a talk on how to be a lawyer that engineers love. This conversation includes the importance of dot connecting, regulatory courage, hiring for curiosity, and why in-house lawyers need to embrace AI now.
Becoming a Dot Connector: The CLO’s Unique Lens
Molly is one of the most respected product attorneys in tech, and she very intentionally began her career in product development, rather than law. At P&G Molly worked on the material science challenge of making a child feel wet enough to want to change while keeping their skin safe and dry. And because P&G was in the middle of a patent war with Kimberly-Clark, Molly’s job also involved intensive IP work.
Though she wasn’t a lawyer yet, Molly went to the GC of the baby division and asked how she could help. She ended up contributing to a patent. And then, after noticing that patent filings by P&G competitors were effectively market signals about what was coming next, she proposed using competitive patent analysis as business intelligence. P&G began mapping white space, identifying opportunities, reading the market through the legal record, a shift that completely transformed the company’s product strategy.
"I still today love using all things legal as market clues: tracking dockets, you name it,” Molly said. “By getting involved with the legal team at P&G and doing my day-to-day work as an engineer getting a patent, I was able to see what the power of those two things together can be."
Molly refers to the process of using legal as a lens to advise product, policy, compliance, and business as “dot connecting.” Her job as VP of Legal is to use her unique vantage point deliberately to assess risk and opportunity across the company.
"One of the most important roles we serve as product counsel is to be the dot connector,” said Molly. “We work in channels, not DMs on Slack. We make sure people get FYIs because you never know when someone might be able to connect dots.”
Note from CZ: GC AI was almost called “Product Counsel AI,” for the exact reason Molly is describing: product attorneys who genuinely understand what they are counseling build a different kind of trust with engineering and product teams than those who only show up as a final checkpoint.
Choosing Professional Challenges and People that Energize You
Molly’s strategy for evaluating career moves is to choose workplaces for the people. When she interviewed at Wachtell, it was only her second time in New York City. She left thinking she had met the smartest group of people she had ever encountered, and that she would become a better version of herself working there.
"I never want to be the smartest person in the room,” Molly said. “I want to be surrounded by people that I respect and who are smarter than me.”
When she accepted the role at Kitty Hawk, Molly knew nothing about flying cars or the FAA. She bought Crypto for Dummies the day before she joined Coinbase. In each case, Molly’s deciding factor was the same: am I going to become a better lawyer and leader by being around these people than I would anywhere else?
Five years into her Coinbase tenure, what has kept Molly there is that she still feels that way. Molly completed a massive carve-out and joint venture at Kitty Hawk, finished it, and then left because the hardest work was done and she needed a new challenge.
"I am not a garden tender. Bring me the messier, the better, the war time, the better. I love the intensity,” Molly said. “And gosh, if I had known going into Coinbase how big and how hard the legal battles were going to be, it would have made me sign on the dotted line faster."
Flying Cars, the Coast Guard, and the Art of Questioning
During Molly’s Kitty Hawk tenure, the company developed a vehicle that did not fit neatly into any existing regulatory category. It had wings, flew, and operated close to water. The FAA was uncertain what to do with it. Rather than forcing the question into an existing framework, Molly and the team asked something more fundamental: if the FAA is not the right regulator, who is?
The answer, it turned out, was the U.S. Coast Guard. The vehicle never made it to the commercial market, but the mindset it produced is one Molly has carried into every regulatory situation since: never assume the traditional framework applies. Understand the policy rationale behind the rule before accepting that the rule applies to you. And when you do go to regulators, go in with transparency and candor rather than evasion and you’ll achieve better results.
"Never take the traditional assumptions as a given. Question absolutely everything,” Molly advises. “Be willing to ask foundational questions. I don't know how this regulator might react, and I think it's worth trying to push the envelope. Being genuine and honest about what I knew and didn't know was really important in giving this advice."
Molly also looks for this personality type in new hires. Coinbase is reimagining how the modern financial system operates, and so their legal team must also operate on that level.
"The person who will not fit well on my team is someone who says, yes, I've done X at a public company for 10 years, I know the way it's done,” Molly said. “We are not afraid to question anything and everything. I think that's a ton of fun."
The 3 Hats Every Legal Leader Needs to Wear in the AI Era
Molly believes every GC or CLO should be wearing three distinct hats, each with different skills and priorities. And candidly, she says, most legal leaders are behind on at least one of them.
The first hat is “AI Enabler.” Legal is uniquely positioned to unblock AI adoption across the company before employees find their own workarounds. If you do not get ahead of it, people will find a way. Your job is to make sure that way is safe.
"Legal has a number of critical hats to play with respect to AI. If you're not starting to wear those hats and embracing it as one of your top priorities, you are going to become less relevant. In-house lawyers who do not embrace AI will become extinct."
The second hat is “AI Protector.” Molly references a major software company sending a notice that all user data was being used to train their LLM, and Coinbase began immediately reviewing every agreement to ensure their confidential data wasn’t at risk.
"If something ingests your confidential information and spits it out even in a transformed state, that's still your confidential information,” she said. “So we thought, how do we protect the company? Training and making sure folks understand privilege… all of that is part of that protection role."
The third hat CLOs must wear is “AI Super User.” It’s been fairly easy for Molly to unlock AI usage at Coinbase and to protect the company’s IP, but she’s still in the process of learning how to best incorporate legal AI in her daily workflow. Her ultimate goal, though perhaps a little unconventional, is to become completely dispensable to the company. She’s working on building a bench so deep, she trusts every one of her team members to handle anything.
“I think it’s easy, especially early in your career, for a GC to believe that the company would not survive without them; that they're absolutely indispensable to their executive team,” Molly said. “I feel the opposite. If I am doing my job, I can get hit by a bus or win the lottery tomorrow and my team will continue to function excellently.”
If unlocking your own daily productivity with AI is your mission for the month like it is for Molly, GC AI is a great place to start. Draft, review, and analyze legal docs in seconds, and make your own playbooks for faster daily output. Try it for free at gc.ai.
