Former Top GitLab Lawyer Fired as Company Moves Towards IPO

GitLab Inc. earlier this month fired a top lawyer linked to its former compliance chief, who left the company claiming “discriminatory and retaliatory behavior.”

Jamie Hurewitz, GitLab’s former vice president of legal, spent two-and-a-half years on the job until she was terminated shortly after the company hired a new chief legal officer, according to a source familiar with the circumstances of her departure.

The move came as GitLab, a platform for developing and collaborating on code, has sought to reshape its executive ranks ahead of an expected initial public offering later this year.

Hurewitz recruited GitLab’s former chief compliance officer, Candice Ciresi, who quit the software development startup in November after raising concerns about a plan to restrict the hiring of engineers in China and Russia, two countries perceived as data security threats.

In a post in an online forum, Ciresi said she tendered her resignation just months after joining the company because “I believe GitLab is engaging in discriminatory and retaliatory behavior.”

A GitLab spokeswoman declined to discuss personnel changes.

Ciresi told Bloomberg Law this week that she and Hurewitz both shared reservations with GitLab’s management about decisions that “weighed revenue over people” and could have exposed the company to other risks.

“I tried to prevent a group of hard-working people from becoming second-class citizens, but instead I was vilified and told to keep my mouth shut,” Ciresi said. A GitLab co-founder, Dmitriy Zaporozhets, is from Ukraine and could have been affected by a ban on users with ties to certain countries, she said.

“Opposition within a business can make it stronger—not everyone has to feel the same way,” Ciresi said.

A spokeswoman for GitLab, which operates under an open source model of “extreme transparency” that often puts internal procedures in public forums to discuss, referred Bloomberg Law to a Nov. 12 statement about the data privacy debate that precipitated Ciresi’s exit.

“GitLab has hundreds of roles, and this internal decision would only affect a few specific job roles for future hires that require administrator access to servers hosting sensitive customer-specific GitLab.com data to do their jobs,” the company said. “This policy proposal has not been implemented yet, as discussions are continuing internally.”

Abrupt Exits

Hurewitz joined GitLab in August 2017 after serving as head of the legal department at Vital Images Inc., where she worked with Ciresi, who served as director of legal affairs and compliance officer for the Minnetonka, Minn.-based medical device company.

Hurewitz previously held several other in-house jobs, including working as an associate general counsel for enterprise software company Infor in Saint Paul, Minn., and as corporate counsel in the same city with medical device maker St. Jude Medical Inc.

GitLab’s firing of Hurewitz came ahead of a significant stock vesting event for its former top in-house lawyer, said a source knowledgeable of her employment circumstances.

Ciresi is hopeful the new legal regime at GitLab, which has not yet hired another compliance chief, will have a seat in the C-suite as the company prepares to go public. “I love the product, I love the people,” Ciresi said. “I just think there’s an opportunity for improvement.”

GitLab has had several other recent reductions in force, Ciresi said, among them former chief people officer Sung Hae Kim, who had only joined the company late last year.

A GitLab spokeswoman declined to discuss personnel changes.

IPO Ahead

GitLab, which is based in San Francisco, attained unicorn status in Silicon Valley in September after raising $268 million in Series E funding. That fundraising round valued the company, co-founded by current CEO Sid Sijbrandij, at roughly $2.75 billion.

Earlier this month, GitLab acknowledged its IPO expectations in an announcement touting Robin Schulman’s hire as chief legal officer and corporate secretary. “Having taken a company through a successful public offering and beyond, Schulman’s leadership will be especially important to GitLab in this next phase,” Sijbrandij said in a Jan. 14 statement.

Schulman, a former in-house legal chief at software companies Couchbase Inc. and New Relic Inc., didn’t respond to a request for comment about the departures of Hurewitz and Ciresi. Schulman helped San Francisco-based New Relic through an IPO that raised $115 million in December 2014.

Fenwick & West, where Schulman once worked as an associate, advised the underwriters on New Relic’s IPO. Cynthia Clarfield Hess, co-chair of the startup and venture capital practice at Fenwick, is now serving as lead outside counsel to GitLab.

The law firm’s website shows that Hess led teams of Fenwick lawyers handling GitLab’s $268 million fundraising last year and another $100 million financing round in September 2018.