Daniel Paulson, '15

I am Commercial Counsel at a software company, which means I am the attorney responsible for managing, drafting, and negotiating most large contracts across our business. I also lead our legal automation initiatives, building AI-powered automations to triage requests, track contract data, and route approvals. I like stretching my creative muscles. In my role, I get to do that every day: solving process problems, negotiating novel contract language, writing new automations, and improving our legal playbooks. For better or worse, there are always new problems to solve on an in-house legal team.

Studying history was excellent preparation because, as historians, we practice ingesting large amounts of information and finding the through line; telling a faithful story from the primary sources. That’s essentially what I do today. To negotiate a contract, I ingest information about our business priorities and distill the core arguments I need to make. To build a process, I ingest information about existing systems and stakeholders and craft a vision that ties it all together. Practicing law is all about absorbing a lot of information and identifying what’s relevant. I believe the study of history is one of the best ways to develop that skill.