Lawyers are worried that AI will end the need for lawyers, but one of the nation’s top legal minds on crypto believes it’s going to help the boutique firm she’s launching.

Teresa Goody Guillén – whose clients include Binance’s billionaire founder Changpeng Zhao, known as CZ –  has stepped down as the head of Baker & Hostetler’s crypto practice to start her own, On The Money has learned. 

Goody Guillen has named the firm “Bellementis.” It’s a mashup of the word “beautiful” and “mind,” a name she believes captures the essence of what AI can amplify in the legal profession: Allow smart lawyers like her to farm out the necessary scut work of research to the so-called language models, while she and her team spends more time on high-level strategic analysis.

She tells On The Money her vision for her firm and her own proprietary AI legal platform began taking shape after she weathered punishing stretches working complex cases, grinding as long as 48 hours without sleep.

She figured there had to be a better way. So she tapped into her contacts in the tech-savvy crypto businesses, and began to look at how emerging technologies could be integrated into a sophisticated legal practice.

“Much of the legal industry is still treating AI as an overlay on top of traditional workflows,” she tells On The Money. “But sophisticated legal work requires entirely different infrastructure, quality controls, and operational design. The real opportunity isn’t replacing lawyers, it’s enabling exceptional lawyers to operate more efficiently and strategically at scale.”

Goody Guillén is a pioneer of sorts in the legal profession’s embrace of crypto, I should point out. She began her career as a securities lawyer in the “trad-fi” sense working at the Securities and Exchange Commission and later as the chief operating officer of Kalorama Partners.

That’s the boutique law firm started by the late Harvey Pitt, a legal legend who for decades represented top white-collar defendants (Ivan Boesky was one of his clients) as well as serving as SEC chair under George W Bush.

Back in 2015 and while working with Pitt, Goody Guillén was increasingly fielding requests from top digital asset executives about how to deal with regulators who were skeptical about crypto. That skepticism lasted for years, and Goody Guillén built a practice on how to keep crypto types from falling to the market’s top cops.

Of recent note, she represented CZ in his successful request for a pardon from President Trump, first highlighted on these pages, over a single count of violating the Bank Secrecy Act that led to a four-month jail term. 

She joined Baker & Hostetler in 2019, she says, and largely built the digital asset practice from scratch. That’s one reason why she thinks she can pull off creating a tech-forward firm on her own. The other reason is that she believes she and her team — so far over half a dozen lawyers and advisers — can hold their own because now they have AI on their side.

“Law is a craft we need to protect,” she says. “The problem is you don’t want to outsource critical and strategic thinking, judgment, or nuanced legal analysis to these generic AI tools built as superficial overlays on general-purpose technology. That’s why I came up with my own system designed to enhance sophisticated legal work and my own approach in using it.”