Laura Richardson Hart

Approach

How I work

Before starting Tend, I spent much of my career working in-house, including serving as General Counsel at technology companies at different stages of growth. I worked alongside executives, boards, employees, and cross-functional teams through the ordinary and decidedly non-ordinary problems that come with running an organization.

That experience shaped how I practice. I’m comfortable with complexity, but I don’t think complexity should be preserved for its own sake. I’ll tell you what the law requires, where there is meaningful risk, where reasonable people can make different choices, and where we may all be spending too much time worrying about something that simply isn’t that consequential.

Sometimes the work is a contract. Sometimes it’s an employment issue, a governance question, a new product, a difficult conversation, or a problem nobody quite knows how to categorize yet. The point is not to make everything a legal issue. It’s to know when the legal piece matters, understand how it fits with everything else, and help you decide what to do next.

That’s what I mean by Tend: taking deliberate ownership of what you’re building. Paying attention to what’s working and what isn’t. Strengthening what serves the organization, pruning what doesn’t, and creating what’s needed next.

Background

Experience

I’m a three-time General Counsel and former litigator, with experience advising organizations across industries, sectors, and stages of growth.

I served as General Counsel and Corporate Secretary of Osso VR and Agiloft, and as General Counsel, Chief of Staff and Corporate Secretary of Neural Earth. Earlier in my in-house career, I spent four years at Intel, where I served as embedded legal counsel to product engineering and enablement teams and advised senior leaders on complex legal, commercial, and operational matters. Working inside an organization of Intel’s scale gave me an appreciation for how decisions, processes, and legal advice work across functions and within larger systems.

As General Counsel, I’ve helped high-growth companies through significant financings and transactions, including Osso VR’s $66 million Series C, KKR’s majority investment in Agiloft, and Agiloft’s acquisition of Screens. That work has included financings and both buy- and sell-side mergers and acquisitions (M&A), from preparing for diligence and coordinating advisors through closing and integration.

Before moving in-house, I practiced litigation at Sidley Austin and Lane Powell (now Ballard Spahr), representing clients in complex commercial disputes and class actions. That experience still informs how I counsel clients today, particularly when thinking about how decisions, communications, and contracts may look later when viewed by someone who wasn't in the room when they were made.

Across those roles, my practice has included corporate governance and board matters, commercial transactions, employment, compliance, privacy and security, AI and product counseling, intellectual property, litigation and disputes, M&A and integration, and legal operations. I also have experience supporting organizations with global entities and distributed workforces, where legal questions often cross jurisdictions, functions, and time zones. In other words, much of what tends to land on a General Counsel’s desk because nobody else is quite sure where it belongs.

Qualifications