OpenAI’s Threatened Exodus Would Upend Legal Team Operation (2)

The legal staff that OpenAI has been building threatens to be upended following the ouster of Sam Altman, as dozens of in-house lawyers, including the top two at the startup, have signed a letter promising to leave unless its board resigns.

Jason Kwon, OpenAI’s chief strategy officer, and general counsel Che Chang are among dozens of lawyers and more than 700 of the artificial intelligence company’s 770 employees that in a letter state they are “unable to work for or with people that lack competence, judgment and care for our mission and employees.”

The potential mass departure of employees comes after OpenAI went on a legal hiring spree in the last year, more than doubling the size of its legal and public policy staff, according to public filings, corporate records, LinkedIn profiles, press releases, and state bar directories.

Microsoft Corp.’s former senior director of congressional affairs, Chan Park, joined OpenAI last month as its head of US policy and partnerships. Park will advise the company on “artificial intelligence research and deployment,” OpenAI said in a Nov. 16 filing with the US Senate disclosing his hire.

Microsoft is poised to bring on Altman and fellow OpenAI co-founder Greg Brockman to lead a new in-house research team after the board fired Altman Nov. 17 and Brockman resigned. Microsoft owns 49% of OpenAI and has invested $13 billion in the San Francisco-based company.

OpenAI named Emmett Shear, a former chief executive at video streaming service Twitch, as Altman’s successor late Sunday. Shear, OpenAI’s second interim chief executive in three days, vowed Monday to probe Altman’s ouster.

Kwon and Chang did not respond to requests for comment about signing the letter. OpenAI also did not respond to a comment request.

Chang succeeded Kwon as OpenAI’s legal chief over the summer and told Bloomberg Law in an interview at the time that the company was hiring lawyers “across all disciplines.”

In-House Additions

Gideon Myles, a senior director and head of intellectual property at Dropbox Inc., also joined OpenAI last month as an associate general counsel for patents and trademarks. Myles spent a decade at Dropbox, where he helped the cloud storage company deal with open-source code and fight so-called patent trolls.

OpenAI also picked up a pair of veteran lawyers who collectively spent more than two decades at Alphabet Inc.'s Google.

In August the company recruited Friedrich “Fred” von Lohmann as an associate general counsel for copyright. He was once the public face of the nonprofit Electronic Frontier Foundation and long considered one of the more prominent intellectual property lawyers in the technology industry.

Google hired von Lohmann in 2010 and he retired nearly eight years later after serving as the technology giant’s top copyright attorney.

OpenAI in September added Michael Trinh as an associate general counsel. Trinh spent more than 15 years at Google, most recently as head of litigation advance, a role that saw him handle strategic litigation matters. Kevin Metti, a former legal specialist at Google, is also part of OpenAI’s legal operations team.

Brendan Herron, head of corporate legal at Canva Inc., a graphic design software startup valued at $40 billion that’s using artificial intelligence tools, joined OpenAI in October as an associate general counsel for mergers, acquisitions, and transactions. A month earlier Xiaoju “Michelle” Zheng, a corporate counsel with Amazon.com Inc.’s innovation lab, was hired as a product counsel.

Zheng reunited with former Amazon colleague Thomas Stasi, who came aboard as head of product legal earlier this year as OpenAI ramped up its legal hiring. OpenAI’s policy team also added David Robinson, an expert at the intersection of law and computer science, as head of policy planning. Robinson is a former faculty director at Apple Inc.’s training facility Apple University.

In July, Emma Redmond, a former chief privacy officer and global head of privacy and data protection at Stripe Inc., joined OpenAI in Dublin as an assistant general counsel for privacy and data protection.

All of the lawyers mentioned in this story were signatories to Monday’s letter, as were other notable OpenAI in-house attorneys like Alex Ifthimie, Miguel Manriquez, Benjamin Rossen, Thomas Rubin, and Robert Wu.

External Advisers

OpenAI has retained a roster of outside legal advisers as the company grapples with novel legal issues, including a growing clash between generative artificial intelligence and intellectual property law.

The company said this month it would indemnify customers against copyright-related lawsuits stemming from the use of its popular artificial intelligence chatbot, ChatGPT, and image creation tool Dall-E.

Cooley, Latham & Watkins, and Morrison & Foerster have entered appearances for OpenAI this year in a growing number of copyright cases filed against the company in US federal courts, according to Bloomberg Law data. Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan is representing OpenAI in a trademark lawsuit it filed in August against an unrelated outfit called Open Artificial Intelligence Inc.

Goodwin Procter, which has advised OpenAI on its fundraising efforts, is another law firm with close ties to the company.

OpenAI’s Chang and Kwon are both former Goodwin associates. Ashley Pantuliano, another former Goodwin associate who also worked at Dropbox, was promoted to deputy general counsel in October. Pantuliano said during a webinar earlier this year that she uses ChatGPT for legal work at OpenAI.

OpenAI paid at least $579,200 to Goodwin during fiscal 2018 and 2019, as well as $493,500 to San Francisco’s Adler & Colvin, according to federal tax filings by the company, which show that the Wilton, Conn.-based Roberts Immigration Law Group received $113,600 in 2017. OpenAI’s unique structure has a nonprofit board oversee the operations of a for-profit entity with capped profits.

Chang praised that structure during a speech last month at the Berkeley Law AI Institute. The composition of OpenAI’s board reportedly was at the heart of negotiations related to a so far unsuccessful effort to reinstate Altman.

A Nov. 16 filing confirmed OpenAI’s retention of DLA Piper to lobby Congress on behalf of the company to “build and deploy safe artificial general intelligence.” Politico first reported on the Nov. 16 filings about Park’s hire and DLA Piper, a global legal giant that has helped OpenAI open doors in Washington.