Robinhood GC Lucas Moskowitz Shows ‘Unflappable’ Crisis Skills

When Lucas Moskowitz arrived at Robinhood in 2020 as deputy GC and head of a smalll government affairs team, he was taking on a lot.

Platform outages. An SEC probe. The death of a man trading on the platform. The electronic trading firm was growing quickly, and under a lot of scrutiny.

It was July 2020, the height of the pandemic. Moskowitz and his boss Dan Gallagher, the company’s new chief legal officer, were part of a small team based out of a WeWork in downtown DC.

“I came into a company that was growing really fast and dealing with a lot,” Moskowitz said.

It wasn’t the first time he’d taken a job placing him at the center of a whirlwind. He was Securities and Exchange Commission counsel from 2010 to 2013, where he worked on enforcement and implementing the Dodd-Frank Act, the sweeping law enacted in response to the 2008 financial crisis.

Moskowitz has since risen to senior vice president, general counsel, and corporate secretary at Robinhood—a fast-growing company operating in a heavily regulated space, financial services, but also in emerging areas where policy is lagging technological innovation, like crypto. The company also now has its own DC office.

Moskowitz’s experience in quickly changing regulatory environments, particularly at the SEC, “really well prepared him to lead Robinhood through these similar shifts in the fintech world, and ensuring that the company adapts while protecting the mission to democratize finance,” said Mark Greene, a Cravath, Swaine & Moore partner serving as Robinhood’s outside counsel who knows Moskowitz from his SEC days.

Gallagher, the Robinhood CLO, and a former SEC commissioner, called Moskowitz “pretty unflappable” in a crisis.

“And he’s involved in all of them in some way, shape or form,” Gallagher added.

Cool in a Crisis

Moskowitz’s crisis-management skills were called on in 2021 when the company was dealing with a data breach while Gallagher was away from the office.

“I just said to Lucas, ‘You’ve just got to 100% run with this without reference to me,’” Gallagher said.

“His instincts were really great,” Gallagher added. Moskowitz “brought in the right advisers,” and handled issues including public disclosures, HR, customer privacy issues, and state notifications, Gallagher said.

“He’s good in a crisis—calm and cool and doesn’t go crazy,” Gallagher said. “And, oh yeah, we’ve been tested a lot.”

Moskowitz helped take the company public in 2021. And he played a pivotal role through the 2021 GameStop controversy—when Robinhood limited frenzied trading by retail investors who were driving up the price of certain stocks, such as the online gaming store. The incident led to congressional hearings.

“I watched Lucas make critical decisions under intense pressure, and really helped Robinhood navigate congressional scrutiny,” Greene said.

Greene said Moskowitz’s “tremendous” people skills, crisis management chops and “regulatory prowess” have all contributed to making the Robinhood lawyer an industry force.

“He’s an innovative, outside-the-box thinker,” he said. “Lucas is positioned as one of the most effective and forward-looking GCs in fintech today.”

Moving In-House

The role Moskowitz took on in 2020—as the company’s deputy general counsel, overseeing regulatory, litigation and government affairs—was his first in-house job. He came from WilmerHale, where he’d been a securities lawyer. But he said it’s the role he had before that—chief of staff for then-SEC Chairman Jay Clayton in the first Trump administration—that gave him a taste for corporate legal work.

“In large part, it seemed to me to be more consistent and aligned with what I was doing at the SEC,” including law, managing people, operational work, and some policy and government affairs, Moskowitz said.

He also had an earlier stint on the Hill—at the House financial services committee under Jeb Hensarling (R-TX) and on the Senate banking committee under Richard Shelby (R-AL).

“You never leave a law firm partnership at a place like WilmerHale lightly,” Moskowitz said. “But there were so many things that Robinhood had to offer.”

He wanted to work with Gallagher. He’d be at a growing startup that was capturing attention. And the company’s mission felt aligned with his work at the SEC, with its focus on getting more retail investors into the market.

Before Gallagher and Moskowitz came on, policy work was being handled out of California where the company is based. But as Robinhood grew—and regulatory and policy challenges increased—it became apparent they needed a DC presence.

The government affairs team remains lean: There’s currently one lobbyist each focusing on Republicans and Democrats, plus one for the states, reporting in to Moskowitz.

Moskowitz said he set out to have the team “punch above our weight and be real subject matter experts” when taking meetings with policymakers.

Interpersonal Skills

Gallagher, a WilmerHale partner in 2010 when he met Moskowitz, said he was impressed with the young lawyer’s work ethic.

“He owns everything. I just didn’t have to pay attention” to the matter Moskowitz was working on, Gallagher said.

“That was my first time as a partner at a law firm, and what it meant to have good associates working with you—and Lucas was the best one I ever worked with,” he said.

Moskowitz’s “very diplomatic” and even-keeled demeanor helped him succeed at the SEC and on the Hill, Gallagher said.

“He was amazing up there—not just substantively, but interpersonally,” Gallagher said. “He just got along with everybody.”

Clayton, the former SEC chairman, said one of Moskowitz’s biggest assets in the chief of staff role was his judgment.

“If you’re his client—which is the company, the CEO, or the commission in my case—you feel highly confident that what he’s telling you, he knows well. And he will tell you if he doesn’t know something well.”