I am an attorney and investor based in Seattle. I work with the Ferncliff Law Office PLLC, a firm that I founded, and my legal practice focuses on corporate and transactional law for tech companies, with an additional speciality in open source software licensing. I am an active investor as well, trading US-listed derivatives using quantitative models developed by Klahhane Capital Management LLC, a startup investment fund. Klahhane’s investment approach uses machine-learning models to identify and profit from pricing anomalies in option markets given historical trends.
Previously I was Director of Business Development at the Invention Science Fund (ISF) where I worked on the creation of multiple spin-out companies. I founded and led the OmniWear Haptics project at ISF, which created a wearable tactile interface for VR and AR applications. I am an inventor on multiple patents, primarily in the areas of machine learning and haptic user interfaces, that arose from that time.
Before ISF, I founded and led GreenLine Legal - a LegalTech startup that created machine learning software to analyze contracts. GreenLine’s text analytic software developed novel ways to compare and evaluate legal documents and SEC filings, many years before ChatGPT made such automated tasks much more mainstream.
Prior to GreenLine Legal, I was an associate in the New York office of Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton LLP, where my practice focused on mergers and acquisitions, financing transactions, and securities. My work at Cleary included the buyout of the failed IndyMac Bank from the FDIC, several of Google’s acquisitions of software startups, and multiple private equity M&A and financing transactions.
I obtained my JD from Harvard Law School, my MA from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, and my BA from Tufts University, where I triple-majored in Physics, Mathematics and Political Science. I was a Fulbright Fellow to Nigeria where my research focused on democratization, including work with the National Democratic Institute supporting the 2003 election monitoring.
In my free time I enjoy mountaineering with the Seattle Mountaineers - I have climbed over 100 peaks in Washington, from volcanoes such as Mt. Adams and Mt. Baker to remote and majestic mountains that are seldom visited. I am a graduate of the National Outdoor Leadership School’s Wind River Mountaineering course, where I spent 30 days in the Wyoming wilderness, culminating in an ascent of Gannett Peak.
In addition to this, I regularly compete in triathlons, with a focus on Olympic-distance events, as well as marathons and half-marathons, particularly in beautiful and interesting locations. I swim weekly with the Bainbridge Aquatic Masters and train by running and biking around my home on Bainbridge Island. I have also been a SCUBA diver for over 25 years and regularly dive in the cold but gorgeous local waters as well as my hometown of San Diego.
I am a private pilot as well with Airplane Single-Engine Land and Glider ratings and enjoy flying into the many out-of-the-way airports in the Puget Sound region. I have time in the Cessna 162 and 172, the RV-12, the LET L-23 glider, and the Schweizer 2-33 and 1-26 gliders.
Finally, I have played music my entire life - mostly piano but also guitar, drums, and most recently, electronica. I studied classical piano at Tufts and enjoy composing new music using the awesome power of modern software tools, which bring terabytes of sounds right to your computer. You can hear a bit of my music on Spotify.
What IGL Means to Me
I was an undergraduate at Tufts from 1998 to 2002, and IGL without a doubt defined my time there. I saw Sherman’s pitch during orientation week and knew from that moment that I would do whatever it took to be a part of it. That year, our theme was Global Crime, Corruption, and Accountability and the subject, classmates, and entire experience became an inspiration for the rest of my undergraduate career and beyond.
I followed my freshman EPIIC year with a trip to Sarajevo to research the media’s role in the conflict there. That experience was followed next winter with a trip to Israel and the West Bank, during one of the hopeful and, in retrospect, tragically brief periods of rapprochement. These experiences, as with all my IGL-inspired travel, were just as important to my education and personal growth as my coursework, and I consider myself as unbelievably fortunate to have had these opportunities and hope to contribute back to the community in whatever ways that I can.
I spent the following summer in Copenhagen, Amsterdam, and Washington DC as part of the Humanity in Action fellowship, which is organized around studying the reasons why some societies protected and aided persecuted Jews and other minorities during World War II and why others did not.
I was in Washington DC for the following semester, studying “abroad” at American University and undertaking an internship at the Brookings Institution researching the consequences of welfare reform in the United States.
I then spent the spring semester in Ireland at Trinity College and that summer participated in the Institute’s TILIP Program in Hong Kong, Beijing, and Xi’an. That was my first time in East Asia and inspired a life-long passion for Chinese language, culture, and cuisine.
I relate all of this in detail because Sherman and the IGL staff and community were an integral part of every step along the way. Although IGL is famous (or notorious) for the academic standards it demands from its students, I would argue that an equally important but less conspicuous aspect of the experience are the “soft skills” that IGL teaches: how to ask powerful and influential people for help, the importance of professional relationships, the value both of leadership and also teamwork, the sheer power of persistence, and overcoming imposter syndrome. Another key part of the education was dealing with adversity - the workload of the IGL programs is, in a sense, not entirely “fair” given the amount of credit students receive, and it must be undertaken alongside the demands of all their other courses. But as I see it, this is a feature, not a bug - it helps teach that elusive quality of “grit” - being able to persevere even in the face of perceived unfairness and failure. There were definitely times when I failed to complete all the required reading, or failed to grasp a concept as thoroughly as was required - but it is something you must learn to roll with. A challenge in my mind is not something that you can inevitably master, even with hard work and brains. In order to qualify as a challenge, almost by definition you must overcome failures along the way and success is not guaranteed, despite your best efforts. I have always felt it is because of these failures and not in spite of them that you maximize your chances of ultimately succeeding.
After graduating from Tufts University, I embarked on a Fulbright Fellowship to Nigeria. This was my first experience living and working in sub-Saharan Africa and demanded every bit of the perseverance that IGL helped me learn. I arrived to discover that the university I was affiliated with was on strike (as it was throughout my time there) and dealing with mundane details such as working electricity and internet were problems I never had to confront before. Again, I was aided immeasurably by the IGL community - both Hafsat Abiola and Darren Kew were extremely helpful getting me started.
I returned from my Fulbright to start the Harvard Law School - Fletcher School dual-degree program. At Harvard, I was an editor of the Harvard International Law Journal, where I published a paper on the then-hot topic of the Alien Tort Claims Act and its tantalizing promise of using US courts to adjudicate human rights violations regardless of where they happened to take place. I also became close with Professor Charles Ogletree, who in a different way became my Sherman Teichman for Harvard. I participated in his Trial Advocacy Workshop and represented clients in Roxbury Municipal Court. Knowing how frustrated we became at times, Professor Ogletree would call me in the evening and offer encouragement - something that was above and beyond what most faculty members would ever do. He was my thesis advisor on the topic of gerrymandering and the Voting Rights Act - my introduction to the legal morass of elections law and a small taste of what has transpired since.
Building on my experience with the Institute’s TILIP program, I spent each of my graduate-school summers in China, first in Beijing with the Energy Foundation and the Natural Resources Defense Counsel, researching the Chinese government’s support for a transition to clean energy, then next year researching the use of Chinese criminal law in pursuing political dissent, and finally at the Hong Kong and Beijing offices of Cleary Gottlieb. Apart from my work, I used each of these experiences and a post-bar exam trip to Kunming, to develop my proficiency with the Chinese language - a passion that continues to this day.
One final, though somewhat tangential influence IGL has had on my life was how I met my wife. We were both associate attorneys at Cleary Gottlieb at the time and separately signed up to work on a pro bono project representing the organization Independent Diplomat in its efforts to obtain diplomatic recognition of the Western Sahara as a sovereign nation. Had IGL not been a part of my life, I wonder if I ever would have even known about the plight of Western Sahara and been drawn to the project where I met my spouse - although our efforts providing legal counsel sadly did not achieve the result were were hoping for, it was an unmitigated success for me personally!
Looking Forward
I hope I have conveyed how important IGL has been to me over the years and why being part of the community is such a gift. Yet I feel that I have unfinished business that has taken me too long to attend to. I am returning now to Convisero because I want to teach as well as learn (I also love the name - when I was at Tufts, I started a group called Eclectia, so I have a documented affinity for salon-inspired neologisms…Dilletantio anyone?). My goals now are:
(i) To write and publish, particularly on the topics of defending democracy and strategies for how political systems can address daunting, long term threats such as climate change, deepening inequality, and unsustainable fiscal policies. I am approaching this not from the perspective of a scholar but more as a narrator and guide, helping a general audience (and myself) make sense of these challenges using the extensive historical and scholastic resources that are available but siloed.
(ii) To have a leadership role in the government or non-profit sector where I can help implement some of what I have learned. I am a moderate rather than a polemicist and believe the truth is complex and nuanced.
(iii) To advise, learn, and mentor others to the extent I can. An institution is ultimately merely a collection of people, and it is the people who make Harvard Harvard, or Congress Congress, or IGL IGL. The community is the thing that outlives any individual member - it is a garden that we must continuously cultivate, renew, and expand.
Thanks for reading this far - you must have done well in EPIIC to make it through so much text!
In my thirty years of directing the institute and conducting EPIIC Colloquia, Ehren is a rarity. He triple majored in Mathematics, Physics, and Political Science, demonstrating extraordinary proficiency in both quantitative and qualitative spheres of his brain :) While doing this, he could have created a 4th major, seriously pursuing classical music as a pianist.
He matched this with a determination that I would at times describe as ruthless pursuit of any objective he set his mind to. He uniquely soloed, creating his own trip to the intense post-conflict region of the former Yugoslavia. Essentially, for all the years I knew him, he created his own script. In the recesses of my mind, I imagined what became the synaptic scholar program I created years later, stressing hyper interdisciplinarity.
I used to joke with Ehren about his unyielding ability to concentrate. As my TA, he demonstrated great mentorship, and assiduously read every page of the many books and articles that I assigned, knowing that my students were effectively organized in what they termed “anti-Sherman defense groups,” abstracting, disseminating their abstracts, and coalescing to prepare collectively. Ehren just has written to me that he underlined virtually all of one text, Philip Bobbitt’s, The Shield of Achilles: War, Peace, and the Course of History.
He did not pursue a singular internal life of the mind, rather, he had the zest and enthusiasm for the great outdoors, and a curiosity to see and experience the world and its different cultures, whether it was Nigeria or China. Ehren absorbed not simply knowledge, but contextual knowledge, as he mastered languages to attempt to read in the original (I am reminded in jest of one of my "heroes", I.F. Stone, who mastered classical Greek in his 80s to read Plato's the Death of Socrates).
He personified what I was looking for in an EPIIC student, someone who would embrace both complexity and ambiguity, who could avoid polemical thinking, while having strong, discernable opinions, and not impose his thinking on others. I thought of him as having a really wry wit, too easily misinterpreted as criticism. All of this should have prepared me for Ehren’s accomplishments, and I confess that reading his bio, while he gave me a shortened version, demanded its full length.
I am fond of teaching my students new words, and Ehren has taught me the term ‘Haptics.’
