Dallas, Texas, United States
Lawyer and entrepreneur with expertise in corporate and entertainment law, finance, accounting, distributed systems, decentralized identity, and machine learning/AI.
Hanaper builds verifiable digital infrastructure for compliance carbon markets. Carbon allowances become cryptographically signed credentials: legal property issued by regulators, traded on exchanges, pledged as collateral, and retired with full provenance. Built on the KERI and ACDC protocols for sovereign deployment under domestic law.
Transition Point Law PLLC is a boutique corporate law firm focused on M&A, venture financing, and outsourced general counsel work for high-growth startups. In addition to representing clients, I design and build in-house legal technology and automations, as well as manage outsourced software development.
Switchchord provides legal technology and AI-driven workflows that transform music contracts and chains of amendments spanning decades into structured, verified, and actionable data directly into rights management systems.
Determined to solve complex music licensing and copyright management challenges, I quit practicing law in early 2017 to study technology full time. 2017: primarily blockchain, starting with Bitcoin, Ethereum, and basic cryptographic building blocks. Eventually moved on to distributed systems and consensus mechanisms in general. 2018: mostly researching the intersection of blockchain with copyright law, the music industry, and legal contracts. I also spent a lot of time studying entertainment industry economics and film/TV production and distribution. Realized blockchain wouldn't solve a lot of my specific problems, but still time well spent. 2019: data science and machine learning. Starting with basic statistics and "shallow" learning, graduating to gradient descent-based regression, and eventually moving on to deep learning. From there I focused on privacy-preserving techniques (federated learning, differential privacy, secure multi-party computation, etc.). Somewhere in there I stumbled across the emerging W3C decentralized identity stack, fell in love with it, and switched gears. Dabbled in basic reinforcement learning and deep reinforcement learning before moving on. I also went on a tangent with Ronald Coase, Oliver Williamson's transaction cost economics, and Grossman/Hart/Moore's property rights theory. 2020: world shut down, focused exclusively on decentralized identity for a while. Redesigned the software architecture that became Switchchord to be 100% identity-based. Tied the previous 3 years of research together. 2021: discovered did:peer and KERI and once again redesigned the software architecture to avoid all use of blockchain for identity (due to various privacy and scalability issues). By summer of 2021 I had transitioned from research to application and began filing patents and building Switchchord full time (something that until then had been part time in between researching).
Media and entertainment practice with an emphasis on copyright and trademark prosecution, enforcement, and licensing; music rights clearance and sync licensing for music in film, television, and video games; equity and debt film financing; and recording, publishing and content distribution agreements. Corporate practice including mergers and acquisitions; startup company formation and financing; and general corporate matters.