Why I’m Building This

I didn't start my career as a lawyer. I started as a fifteen-year-old doing tech support at my high school. By the time I was twenty, I had three schools across Sydney as clients. There was something clarifying about that. Dropping in, solving a problem, moving on. Around the same time, I was elected to the board of my university's student union, where I learned the difference between governing and managing, and what it means to be accountable at the top of a structure rather than just in the weeds.

I came to law through a summer clerkship at a top-tier firm in Sydney, followed by practice as an associate. I learned the craft, but soon moved into tech. There I spent years in and around legal departments, mainly as a seller of legal software, sitting in the room when deals were being done. I watched the gap widen between what legal work was supposed to do and what it actually produced. More paper. More process. More rounds of review by people who hadn't met the client.

I was lucky enough to land at a venture-backed AI startup in New York, where I had several roles across customer experience, sales, and product, before passing the New York bar and coming back to legal. But I kept running into the same feeling: the structures I was operating in were doing something to the work that didn't sit right with me.

When I decided to build something of my own, I kept coming back to those early experiences. Small enough to be accountable. Experienced enough to be useful. Structured so that when you reach out, you get me.

Regulus Law is a privacy, AI governance, tech transactions, and business formation practice. It's also a fractional general counsel practice for companies that need serious legal thinking without the overhead of a full-time hire. I use AI like a junior associate for drafting, research, and organization, with human judgment applied to everything that leaves my desk. I run on commercial-grade tools, not consumer platforms, because confidentiality isn't a feature you opt into. It's a baseline.

I came back to what I've always been good at, on terms I can stand behind. That's why I'm building this.

— James