Matt Turetzky leads litigation at Kraken after four years at Coinbase, where he helped direct two cases that reached the Supreme Court. In this conversation he walks through how a question about pausing district court litigation turned into a circuit split, and how a seemingly airtight Supreme Court argument still ended in a 9-0 loss.
We also get into how he manages outside counsel as what he calls an apex consumer of legal services, why he pushes work toward fixed fees, and why he left a secure path at a big firm to become the first associate at a brand-new litigation boutique. His answer to the partner who questioned that move: "Have you considered the risk of me staying?"
Top Insights
- A stalled question about whether Coinbase's district court proceedings could be paused during appeal led Matt to a circuit split, and eventually to two related cases at the Supreme Court for the same client in the same posture.
- Sitting in on the oral argument for Coinbase's second Supreme Court case, Matt walked out certain of a win. The Court ruled 9-0 against Coinbase, and it permanently changed how much confidence he puts in "the argument went well" ahead of a decision.
- Matt builds relationships with outside counsel before there's a crisis to manage. A purely arm's-length billing relationship, in his experience, falls apart exactly when a firm needs flexibility on fees or scope.
- He calls himself an "apex consumer" of legal services and pushes as much work as possible into fixed fees, so he can compare firms on value instead of hourly-rate discounts that rarely hold up once the matter is underway.
- His editing rule for legal writing: spend the most time on a brief's first sentence, a good chunk more on the introduction, and comparatively little on everything after that, because that's where a judge or law clerk decides whether to keep reading.
- Leaving a secure BigLaw track, he became the first associate at a new litigation boutique, reframing the risk for a partner who warned him against it: "Have you considered the risk of me staying?"
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Full Transcript
Khurram Naik: Matt, I'm excited to have you on here today. We've gotten to know each other a little bit over the past couple of years, and I've learned about how your practice has evolved. It's continued to evolve since then, since you left Coinbase and moved into a new role at Kraken. One thing that strikes me is that in your four years at Coinbase, you saw two Supreme Court decisions that you were directly involved in the strategy for. I think that's pretty remarkable, and I'd love to hear about your experience there.
Matt Turetzky: Yeah, sure. Thanks so much for having me. The Supreme Court cases that I worked on while at Coinbase certainly weren't something I anticipated working on when I joined the company. I joined to bring some senior leadership to the company's consumer arbitration docket. When I joined, I was managing one lawyer. By the time I left, I was managing closer to a dozen, and had a very large docket of class actions and appellate litigation that had grown during my time there. And yeah, we had two cases that went to the Supreme Court on arbitration issues. Those cases went up together the first time, and then separately, Suski, which is the second case, went up the following term. It was an extraordinary experience. Happy to dive into the details, outside counsel selection strategy, happy to go in any direction you want.
Khurram Naik: I think maybe actually going back even earlier. From a risk management perspective, what are the things that companies... was there something that, in retrospect, gave you new insight? Something where you thought, here's something we could do on the risk management side that would mitigate this. Obviously there's any number of issues that are going to come up regardless of how a case goes. So I guess at the outset, with the benefit of hindsight, was there something predictable about this? Or put it another way: in the wake of these disputes, did that revise how Coinbase thought about risk?
Matt Turetzky: That's a really good question. Actually, there is, and it might not be what you expect. So Suski, that's the second case that went up to the Supreme Court, I went to the oral argument and sat in on it. If you go back and listen to the oral arguments, because they're public, you'll see that the justices were beating up quite a bit on the lawyer for the other side. And you've probably heard lawyers hedge when they talk about risk. Oh, nothing's a hundred percent in litigation. I walked out of the Suski oral argument thinking there was a hundred percent chance that Coinbase prevailed in that appeal, and that the Supreme Court was going to reverse the Ninth Circuit below. The outcome of that case was the Supreme Court issued a 9-0 decision affirming the Ninth Circuit. So I was dead wrong in thinking there was a hundred percent chance that Coinbase was going to prevail based on what I heard in oral argument. And I think what it did for me was it softened my confidence going into litigation. You prepare as best you can, you perform as best you can, the outcome seems certain as you're watching the trial, and the reality is the outcome is never certain. You never know what a judge or a jury is going to say, and that risk always exists when you take a case to decision. So that now features more prominently in how I think about risk. Even when you've done everything right, even when the trial or the hearing goes exactly how you'd hope, you could still get a decision that totally upends the way you thought the case went.
Khurram Naik: And subsequently with something like sweepstakes. I've never litigated anything in that space, but I see it come up in Law360 or from certain lawyers' experience. It seems like sweepstakes are often litigated where consumers claim insufficient disclosure, or something misleading. So did that revise Coinbase's appetite for engaging in promotions like that, or other kinds of consumer-facing things? There are different risk tolerances you can engage with. How did that risk calculus for what the business did change over time in light of the litigation?
Matt Turetzky: Yeah, well, I want to be careful not to speak for Coinbase, but I'll speak for myself in how I think about these issues. One thing it really underscored for me was how much of class action litigation these days is about process and not about substance. The underlying merits of a case, Coinbase, like any company, has product counsel, has a relationship with the decision-makers to decide what's the appropriate level of risk, how do you launch a sweepstakes, what does that look like. But the way I think about some of these issues, and the way they manifest in consumer litigation, is making sure you have the right process. Do you want this dispute to go to arbitration, or do you want it litigated in court? Is there a process you could put in place that makes resolving these disputes more efficient, quicker, and less painful for the business? So I definitely think the litigation I worked on while I was there related directly to that. The thing the company was fighting for was about the process, about upholding its arbitration program. And the way I think about class action litigation to this day, even at Kraken, is influenced by a lot of those fights, that a lot of these things are as much about process as they are the underlying substance.
Khurram Naik: Was there anything about Coinbase? Did other businesses launch sweepstakes as well, like a giveaway tied to something, or whatever? And aside from that specific promotion, did you have the impression that Coinbase was particularly a target of class actions compared to some peer company? Was it more or less average?
Matt Turetzky: Well, definitely. Look, if you look at the public dockets of all the crypto companies, they're all targets. They're the exciting thing for the plaintiff's bar to go after, for regulators to look at. And I think just by being the thing that's in vogue, an industry like crypto is necessarily going to get a lot of litigation. Frankly, that was a big reason why I joined the company, and it's part of the reason I'm still in crypto. I love litigation, I love Kraken, I love Coinbase, I love defending these companies. It's really a privilege to be able to do that. I also believe deeply in their mission. So yeah, by nature of the industry they're in, they absolutely attract litigation. But that's true for a lot of companies in frontier industries. Look right now at OpenAI or Anthropic, and look at their litigation docket. Look at the prediction markets companies and the litigation they're facing. Whenever a company is trying to do something new, in a space that isn't well defined, where the regulatory parameters aren't cleanly set, where the ink on the rules isn't dry, that's going to be the type of thing where there's a lot of litigation. And my own career path, I've tried to flock to that sort of thing.
Khurram Naik: So at what point in your tenure did it seem to you, hey, we might have some appeals going to the Supreme Court?
Matt Turetzky: Yeah. I think that was when we were filing, when we were trying to get the district court proceedings stayed in both Suski and Bielski. It was sort of a lightbulb moment for me, when I wasn't yet that familiar with arbitration law. I was just really beginning to cut my teeth on it. I'd looked into the issue and thought, gosh, we really shouldn't be spending time or money on this if we're going to appeal, and it just made sense to me that we'd ask for a stay. When I looked into it deeper, I realized it's actually not a sure thing that you get a stay. That was when I raised my hand and said, wait a second, why not? Then we dug deeper and realized, well, you don't automatically get a stay in the Ninth Circuit, but maybe if we were somewhere else, we would have. I just kept pushing, asking why, why, why. And then finally I realized, wait a second, I may have a circuit split I'm holding onto. And not only did I have a circuit split I could raise in a case coming up on appeal, but I had two cases going on appeal to the same court, for the same client, in a similar posture. It seemed like a uniquely fortuitous moment. If we were going to raise this issue and try to get the Supreme Court to hear it, this seemed like as good an opportunity as any. And once I'd sunk my teeth into the idea that this doesn't seem fair, this doesn't seem right, I just didn't let go of it until the Supreme Court granted cert and ultimately ruled on it.
Khurram Naik: That's interesting, because I think it would be reasonable for another litigator to say, that sucks, the law's a mess here, I guess that's what the Ninth Circuit does, and then just accept it and move on. So where does that instinct come from? Is there some precedent in how you litigate cases that made you just keep pulling that thread? Because I think a lot of litigators would say, good enough, we're not in the business of taking things to the Supreme Court.
Matt Turetzky: Yeah. Well, I think I always try to look for asymmetries as a path to victory, whatever that is, and that's just been a through-line throughout my career. Shortly before joining Coinbase, there was a motion to dismiss I filed that several senior lawyers, who I have tons of respect for, thought had no way of working. I had this really technical argument around Rule 15, around why Rule 15 doesn't permit the other side to replead, and that the court should dismiss the case. I just kept pushing on that argument. It resonated with me, and I thought it should resonate with a court, so I kept pushing it. Sure enough, we got the dismissal for that client, and the case went away. So there were a number of moments along the way where I kind of got onto something and just couldn't get myself off of it. I think part of it too, Khurram, is that in all of these situations, I couldn't see the downside to holding on. What if I'm wrong? What if the Supreme Court denied cert? What if the Supreme Court ruled against us? I didn't see that outcome as a terrible downside. I looked at the downside as relatively low and the upside as tremendous. If you're not going to throw the ball deep, you're not going to score a ninety-yard touchdown. That doesn't mean you should throw it deep every time, but that was the mentality I brought into this. This seems like a really good pass to throw, and if there's an opportunity to take it, we should, and we did.
Khurram Naik: And it seems specific to taking an appeal. The marginal cost of an appeal is relatively low relative to trial court proceedings. So it's a good investment.
Matt Turetzky: Yeah, especially in the class action posture. If the case is going to stay in a federal district court, in a class posture, even before you get a ruling on class certification, your client may be spending millions of dollars on legal fees. So yeah, it definitely seemed like the right bet. Even if we lost, the asymmetry of what a win means, at least for me, made it a no-brainer.
Khurram Naik: What was your initial sense of the pathway to the Supreme Court, and how did that change as you progressed?
Matt Turetzky: Well, for me personally, I was learning on the job. I didn't come to Coinbase as an appellate lawyer, and very quickly had a growing appellate docket, and then had two cases that went to the Supreme Court. While I'd filed appeals before, appeared with law firm partners and other associates at various appeals, and even worked on a cert petition long ago early in my career, I didn't really know much about Supreme Court practice. One of the first things I learned was that Supreme Court practice is its own animal. It's not like going to the Ninth Circuit or another regional circuit. It's really its own thing. There's a Supreme Court bar. There are folks who do nothing but take cases to the Supreme Court. Of course they'll do appeals generally and hold themselves out as an appellate practice, but you increasingly see this with several firms that have some of the best reputations in the space. They hold that practice out specifically as a Supreme Court practice. Once the Supreme Court granted cert, that world really opened up, and it became clear to me how different this was from what we saw at the Ninth Circuit, in terms of prep, in terms of who else is on the bar and might align with you, folks who might reach out to file an amicus brief. There are just so many things that happen at the Supreme Court level that don't happen in the lower courts.
Khurram Naik: So managing a case before the Supreme Court is going to be very different from managing a case at the lower courts. What were the differences once you learned it on the fly? And I'm also interested. Was there any press, or anyone else you were learning from, to get insight into a case like this?
Matt Turetzky: Yeah, for sure. First, a lot of credit here goes to my then-boss, Katherine Minarik, and her boss at the time, Paul Grewal. Both of them gave me the green light to interview some of the best Supreme Court practitioners in the country, and we ultimately hired Neil Katyal and his team. At the time, Neil was at Hogan Lovells and was working with another fantastic appellate lawyer, Jess Ellsworth, and their whole team of associates and partners. They were all amazing. One thing that's different, and something I learned from the whole process: in district court proceedings, or arbitration, or cases that don't get the spotlight of the Supreme Court, I tend to have strong views on what our advocacy should say and how we should say it. One of the things I had to do was keep that voice in the process, because I knew the company best, I knew our issues best. But I didn't know how the Supreme Court was going to receive it, and I didn't have a sense of how to frame those issues for the Supreme Court, because I'd never done that before. So part of what I had to figure out was how to keep that voice while also making sure the Supreme Court practitioners knew exactly how to frame the argument in a way that would resonate with the justices. I had to find and navigate that balance, and that was something I had to learn on the fly. But there was a lesson I learned later on that I thought was really interesting, and maybe is a good segue into how I think about relationships and team building. I'd asked Neil, really. How are you doing all of this? This was on the heels of a Ninth Circuit argument I'd attended with him and Jess Ellsworth that day. He'd flown out to San Francisco, he and Jess were there for the Ninth Circuit argument, they did the argument, then got whisked away to SFO on their way back to DC. They sent me a letter that would later be filed with the Supreme Court. And then that night, he's on MSNBC being interviewed. And I'm thinking, my gosh, how do you do all that in one day, and not only do it in one day, but do it really, really well? The feedback he gave me was that he spends a ton of his time focusing on his team, that his team is his number one asset, and that becomes, by extension, the number one investment of his time. That stuck with me. It's still one of the things I think about the most. Am I spending enough time with my team, am I investing enough in my team, am I thinking enough about recruiting? Because I saw the success and the leverage it brought for one of the titans of our industry, and it's something I try to continue learning from and working off of. It's always a work in progress for me, but it was really amazing to see that up close and at scale while I was working on the Supreme Court litigation.
Khurram Naik: That's a good insight, a meta insight. Is there anything else from how the appellate team practiced that subsequently influenced how you approach other cases?
Matt Turetzky: It's going to be unsatisfying, but I think the answer is no. The influence that experience gave me has a lot to do with how I think about Supreme Court practice. Actually seeing that in play for the first time taught me a lot about how that appeal is different from an appeal to a regional circuit court. I also think it had an influence on me in terms of how the prep for that effort is different. You're not going into an oral argument at the Supreme Court without memorizing the entire record. You know where every single question is going to come from, you know where every single pin cite is in the record, you're going to be able to spoon-feed the answer to any question the justices would ask. It's a completely different type of prep than what you'd do for, say, an arbitration hearing. You just wouldn't do that. So it's unsatisfying, but I think the answer on that one, Khurram, is no.
Khurram Naik: Well, is it okay. Is an answer then to allocate more of your team to trial court work, so you have the capacity to focus more deeply on appellate and potentially Supreme Court matters?
Matt Turetzky: Sorry, can you ask that again? I'm not sure I'm following that.
Khurram Naik: Was there an insight, as part of this leverage insight, that changed your calculus around allocating your time. That you needed to have capacity for handling these kinds of issues, and therefore got your team to handle more of the trial court litigation?
Matt Turetzky: Oh, no, no, no, I wouldn't say the Supreme Court cases are what did that. I think, look, a Supreme Court case. I don't know if I'll see another one. I plan to practice litigation for my whole career, and I think I'm at like the fifty-yard line at this point. It's more likely than not that I don't see another one. It's very, very rare. Even if you have a large docket, even at a company much bigger than Kraken, much bigger than Coinbase, the idea that you see one at all in a successful forty-year career is really, really low. So the fact that I saw two does feel a lot like I got struck by lightning, and I want to be realistic about that. So I don't think it changes how I think about leverage and litigation below, at the trial court. What I will say is that when lightning does strike, having the opportunity to clear your desk, and to have a team who can support you so you can focus on it, I think that was a gift. I don't know that by itself it's the thing that makes me think, I need to build a team that gives me that leverage because I may see another Supreme Court case. But I do think building a team that's really effective, a team that could step in and do just about anything. That's what made it possible. And frankly, when the case went up, if it wasn't for all the issues the company was dealing with at the time. You have to remember, around that time Coinbase was being looked at by the SEC, there were a number of enforcement actions later launched against members of the industry, not just Coinbase but Kraken as well. One of the things that was amazing about that experience was that Paul and Catherine, the head of litigation and our chief legal officer, let me lead that case. They didn't have to do that. That alone was an example of what leverage buys you. If you have a team, maybe you have someone who can manage this while there's some other bigger risk where you, as the CLO or head of litigation, need to be. I don't know that it was a lesson that came out of the Supreme Court litigation itself, but it was absolutely an experience. Seeing that leverage in action, and what it enabled for my colleagues and the other leaders, was pretty incredible, and I got to be the beneficiary of it, having the opportunity to work on this case while folks reporting to me were able to work on the other litigation we had. I was able to focus on these appeals for a couple of weeks. It was truly a gift, and I'm grateful for that.
Khurram Naik: Have you thought about the counterfactual of being in-house at a different company. Let's say a large tech company, in a comparable function, focusing on consumer litigation? Have you ever thought about what that path would have looked like? Or maybe another lens on this. If someone approached you with an opportunity to go to a large tech company, versus a company more like Coinbase or Kraken, how do you think about the pros and cons between the two?
Matt Turetzky: Yeah. Well, before I joined Coinbase, I don't think I knew that I was looking to join a crypto company, or that I wanted to be in crypto. When I joined Coinbase, I was largely thinking about the opportunity to go work with Katherine Minarik, who was a client of mine when I was in private practice. I knew what it was like to work with her, I looked up to her, I was impressed by her, and I thought the idea of working with her every single day on exciting litigation at a company like Coinbase was alone reason to do it. And then, of course, Paul Grewal leading the legal team presented the opportunity to be on a legal team with a different philosophy than a lot of legal teams when it comes to litigation. I'd worked for a lot of clients whose litigation function was regarded as a cost center, not treated as a strategic partner to the business, hand in glove with how the business thinks about launching its products. You have the litigators right next to the product folks, trying to pave the road for the product teams to drive on. That was really exciting to me. If I was going to go in-house, I wanted to be on a litigation team that was going to be a strategic partner to the business, and that's not something you get at every in-house job. So the answer to your question, Khurram, is yes. That was a lot like what I was thinking about when I joined Coinbase. I wasn't thinking about it in the sense of wanting to be in crypto, the way I was thinking about it when I joined Kraken and stayed in crypto. But the north star I followed was: where is the exciting work, and who are the A players I'd want to do that work with? I let that be my guide as I moved from private practice to in-house practice.
Khurram Naik: How much do you weigh the two related components. The substance of the work versus the relationships? Does one outweigh the other for you, and did that change over time?
Matt Turetzky: The relationships definitely changed over time, but the initial pull, the initial attraction, was there from the get-go. I think the nature of the relationships changed over time.
Khurram Naik: So the question is whether the substance, what was interesting about the work subsequently. Did the composition change, the percentage breakdown of why you made the move, between the substantive work and the relationships? Was there an initial mixture between the two for why you made the move, and did the reasons you stayed in the role change over time?
Matt Turetzky: Let me focus on the second part of that. Did the reasons I stayed change over time? I think the answer is yes, unquestionably, because when I joined Coinbase, I don't think I was all in the way I am now, on this idea that crypto is the technology that's going to unleash financial freedom in the world in the twenty-first century, that it's here to stay, that it's going to rewire our financial system. I think that's also bearing out, so it's easier for me to feel that way now than it maybe was in 2021. So that's one way it changed. I really did fall in love with the product, with the industry, and still am. Another thing that changed was the scope of my role. When I joined the company back in 2021, my remit was really to bring senior leadership to a few consumer arbitrations, and I was managing one other lawyer, this nascent consumer litigation function. By the time I was three or four years in, I was managing class actions, managing the appellate work, I'd taken on commercial litigation, I was working closely with the institutional team. I was basically covering all of the company's litigation except IP, regulatory, employment, and shareholder litigation. So at that point the role had really transformed, Khurram. No longer was I in this niche, covering a narrow surface area. No longer was I a manager of one. I had a big team. I think that really changed the nature of the role, and was a big part of what kept me there for as long as I was.
Khurram Naik: I think it's interesting to hear how you manage outside counsel. The top five briefly at the Supreme Court level, but I think you'll talk about it more generally. Something you said in one of our earlier calls that I thought was really interesting was that when you're in-house as litigation counsel, you're the apex consumer of legal services. Talk more about that concept.
Matt Turetzky: Yeah, absolutely. I think it's especially true in litigation, though it might be true for a few other practice areas too. Generally speaking, litigation is a big consumer of outside counsel budget for most legal teams. So I look at my job as being a good steward of the budget we have to spend on outside counsel, and that means my job is also being an apex consumer of these services. I have to do it better than anyone else would. I have to make sure we're getting the very best value for the dollars we're spending, because that's not just my remit, it's the only way it makes sense. Sometimes that means you hire one firm for one type of thing, maybe a different firm for another, maybe you bring some of that work in-house, maybe it's a mix of all of those things. Being good at that, and flexing that muscle, I think is a critical part of my job day in and day out, and I'd like to think I do it well.
Khurram Naik: What do you do differently than, say, a typical counterpart?
Matt Turetzky: I think one thing I'm very deliberate about is spending time cultivating relationships with the lawyers I'm working with, or lawyers I'd consider working with. Outside counsel will reach out from time to time and want to get dinner, get lunch, go to a baseball game, something like that, and I'm very intentional about trying to do those things. I think those relationships become important infrastructure for the work the team and I are doing, and if I don't make time for those off-the-clock meetings, then all the relationships I have will be just about the work, and I'm not sure that's the most effective way to go about it.
Khurram Naik: What are times you feel like that's created different outcomes, because you took that approach rather than treating it as purely a business or functional relationship?
Matt Turetzky: Well, I wish every relationship I have with my outside counsel was just sunshine and rainbows, but it isn't always. I find that navigating disputes, navigating problems, navigating issues about fees or bills, whatever it might be, is all easier when both sides to the transaction are genuinely interested in the relationship. If it's just arm's length, if it's just about the work, if it's just, well, we did this work for you, it took us twenty hours, here's our hourly rate, here's our bill, pay it or don't. If that's the nature of your relationship with outside counsel, you're not going to have any leverage to accomplish your client's goals. From time to time your objectives on a matter change, and when they do, you need to renegotiate fee arrangements, you need outside counsel to help figure out how you meet your business objectives while also meeting your budgetary objectives, and you want your outside counsel to be a partner in that. So having a personal relationship with the outside counsel you're working with is a critical part of being able to generate those outcomes, where you're producing the business outcomes you want while also doing that on budget. And then the other place this comes up is conflicts. This is the unspoken, unwritten undercurrent of outside counsel relationships with corporate clients. Navigating conflicts. I worked at a couple of large firms and saw how conflicts, not even genuine conflicts of interest but so-called business conflicts, could make it difficult for younger partners or senior associates to cultivate new business. I've also worked at a litigation boutique where our conflicts check process consisted of me standing up, going around the corner, and asking the partner, hey, can I do this thing with so-and-so? So I've seen how different platforms navigate conflicts, and I've always found that navigating conflicts with large firms is way more challenging than with smaller firms. When you have one of those conflicts, being able to call up the partner and level-set. Like, we cannot have X, Y, and Z happen, this is going to be a problem for the relationship, how do we fix this, separate from what's an actual conflict of interest. These are very serious conversations. They happen, I don't think they get reported about, there's no playbook for how to navigate them, but I do find that having personal relationships means there have been several times I've been able to call up a partner I have a personal relationship with and say, this cannot happen, this way, how do we fix this. And we almost always get to a good place, and I credit the personal relationships for that.
Khurram Naik: On the flip side, how do outside counsel who are looking to become go-to counsel for you, someone you rely on, earn that trust and that connection?
Matt Turetzky: I think it takes time. If the stakes are low enough, it's just reps. If it's someone who's going to work on low-stakes matters, it's pretty easy for me to give a firm, say, a trial matter, if I'm looking for new counsel to take on a piece of the portfolio that's relatively low stakes. But if I were to pinpoint one thing I think more outside counsel should do if they're trying to develop business and break in with a new client: find out what that client's legal problems are, and keep them briefed on the state of the legal landscape and how they could go about solving those problems. An example I mentioned to you before this podcast. You'll remember I was telling you about an outside counsel firm that reached out to me, this was back when I was at Coinbase, wanting to share some of their insights about consumer arbitration, class actions, mass arbitrations, all the things right up my alley. The ask was, are you open to just having a conversation with us for an hour about the current state of the law, no strings attached, we just want to tell you what we're seeing. Sure, why not. What's the worst thing that could come of that conversation, it's a waste of my time and I don't have to have another one. So I had that conversation, got a ton of insight into what was happening in that area, learned a lot about developments on the plaintiff's side, and thought, we should have this conversation more regularly. So we had it on a monthly basis, and a few months in I brought my team with me. I didn't want to just hear this stuff in a vacuum, I wanted the leaders from my team to hear it too. More time goes by, now we're ten or eleven or twelve months in, we've had a dozen of these conversations. They know me, I know them, I know what they're capable of, and so does my team. Then we finally get a matter that's right in their sweet spot, and suddenly they become one of the first calls on the RFP to pitch the case, and sure enough they got it. To this day, that firm is among my most trusted advisors on issues relating to class actions and mass arbitration. There are actually a couple of other firms that have done things similar to that, and I keep those conversations going so I have a mental rolodex of where I might deploy this person versus that person. Going back to what you were saying before, Khurram, about being an apex consumer of legal services. This is what that means. Figuring out how to put the right people in the right place for the right matter takes time, cultivation, and hours upon hours of conversation.
Khurram Naik: Is there anything apart from substantive expertise that goes into your judgment for how you allocate litigation?
Matt Turetzky: I've had so many outside counsel pitch me and say, don't let it be about cost when we make the decision. It's often about cost, and that doesn't mean the practice of law is supposed to be a race to the bottom, but different matters have a different value to the litigation portfolio I manage, and I try to be a good steward of the limited budget we have. I try to move more of my budget to the matters where the potential for the fire burning brightest is highest, and reduce spend on areas where the likelihood things will exacerbate or blow up is relatively low. So cost is a big part of it, and it's not as simple as what your billable rate is.
Khurram Naik: Sure, tell me about how you think about cost then.
Matt Turetzky: Yeah, so if you're doing an RFP, for example, and you've got a bunch of firms who all say, oh, I think it'll cost this to do a motion to dismiss, this to go through discovery, this to get to summary judgment. I've never had one of those loose budgets hold up, ever. When firms present their hourly rates and say, look at the steep discount we're doing on our hourly rates, look at what our rates are, I rarely look at those rates and think that tells me where the value is. Fundamentally, when I go back to my clients at the business and explain where I'm spending the team's money and why we're spending it a certain way, it's the bottom line the business is looking at. They're not interested in the hourly rates, the discounts, what the budget was, or why you didn't meet the budget. So increasingly, what I try to do is encourage our outside counsel to move as much work as possible to fixed fees or alternative fee arrangements. Sometimes firms push back and say it may be more expensive that way. One, I don't believe that, but two, even if it were true, moving predictable sets of work into fixed fees gives you the opportunity to do an apples-to-apples comparison when you do an RFP. One firm may be a thousand dollars an hour for this lawyer, another firm fifteen hundred dollars an hour for that lawyer, but the only way to do a true comparison of what it's going to be like to hire firm A versus firm B is by getting a fixed price for a defined scope of work, not just a loose budget. When you can do that, you can make a decision that takes price into account, and you also foster better price competition. When outside counsel says, don't let this be about price, you can go back and say, you said don't let this be about price, you proposed doing this scope of work for X, but I've got another firm that said they'd do it for Y, and if you don't want it to be about price, I need you to get down to Y. Now you have real price competition, rather than firms trying to match rates or give estimates that ultimately don't bind the spend.
Khurram Naik: I'm curious. Another benefit for you is that more certainty around cost also means it costs less of your attention, and attention is scarce.
Matt Turetzky: Yeah, it's not a great use of my team's time to go line by line through invoices, questioning why did you spend point nine on writing this email. I'm sure anyone listening who is or has been in private practice has received that email from a client saying, hey, take a look at this, why did you spend so much time on this. It just seems like a weird way to do the economics, and yet that's how our industry works, the expectation is you throw the invoices over the fence and the client goes line by line through them. Of course that work is a lot easier now with AI, so the marginal cost of doing that type of evaluation has gone down considerably over the last couple of years. But it still doesn't seem like a great use of anyone's time. The person best positioned to manage cost and scope creep is the relationship partner running the matter at the law firm, not me, not my team. Where my team and I can add a lot of value is on the management side, articulating and defining what the company's strategic objectives are and providing insight on how we believe we get there. But it's outside counsel's job to go deep, and it's our job as in-house counsel to go wide, and the only way that actually happens is if, by going deep, outside counsel isn't just going deep on the law but also going deep on the management of their team.
Khurram Naik: How do you translate spend on a matter into an objective for the business. This accomplishes certainty, this creates this outcome that improves our performance as a business? And the related question. What do you want outside counsel to know so they're better able to translate their work into something the business values?
Matt Turetzky: With my clients internally, which at Kraken is really the executive team, the CEO, the chief legal officer, I think it's critical that I understand how they think about what's important to the company, what our litigation team should be doing, what fights we should be having, what hills we should be willing to die on versus the ones that aren't really worth it. That just requires time, the same way I spend time with my outside counsel building relationships and making sure it's not just arm's length but a personal interest in my and my team's success. I do the same with my clients. I want to understand how they think about risk. When I speak to them one-on-one, I try to ask them questions about how they're thinking about things, what's important to them, and once it's clear to me what those things are, I try to advocate for those things whenever possible, whether through my own advocacy externally, on social media, or behind the scenes with outside counsel, making clear this is our objective, this is the thing we need to say, how do we get this across in the brief, this has to be conveyed to the judge. It's really about understanding where my clients are coming from and making sure the advocates going out to have those fights are conveying the things that are important to the clients.
Khurram Naik: And then how can outside counsel better position the work product to help set you up for success?
Matt Turetzky: Great question. So for anyone who wants to work with Kraken, I think the first thing you could do is read the Kraken culture doc. And no longer being a lawyer for Coinbase, I'd imagine reading the Coinbase culture doc is probably a good idea too if you were trying to do work for Coinbase. The reason I say that is when companies put materials out that try to define or describe who they are, and you're angling to be the advocate for those companies, you really ought to understand who they are. There's a resource out there where you can learn what makes Kraken tick, what's important to Kraken, how they think about communication, the fights they're having, what the mission of the company is and how they're going to accomplish it. I've spent a lot of time with my outside counsel on a few matters where we're really fighting for a principle, not economics, and I've quoted the culture doc to our outside counsel. This is the way we need to be thinking about things. So that's one easy tactical thing: know your client. Some clients have culture docs, and that's one way to know them. Another way is when you take a client out for lunch, dinner, or a baseball game, ask them what's important, what's going on, what's top of mind in the business. You could go read the news and see the new products we've launched, the aspirations we have, the markets we're breaking into, our policy advocacy, even things I've put out there about our litigation advocacy. But actually getting in with your clients or prospective clients and understanding what's keeping the business up at night, the behind-the-scenes stuff that doesn't make it into the culture doc or the public advocacy, I think that's exactly the type of thing to focus on.
Khurram Naik: What's the most underrated thing that outside counsel can do to help you?
Matt Turetzky: Most underrated thing. I don't know where this sits on the distribution curve of ratings, so maybe it isn't underrated, but responsiveness. I think it's probably the most important thing. Even if you're busy and can't get to it, just being able to respond, or having an associate respond, saying, we got this, is this an immediate thing or do you need this in a couple hours. That responsiveness is critical. I try to be responsive to my clients, so I expect my outside counsel to be responsive to me, and I think responsiveness has been a big part of my success. I suspect the outside firms that do it better are the ones that will be more successful.
Khurram Naik: What does responsive mean to you? What's the significance of responsiveness?
Matt Turetzky: The significance is, at least with my clients, it's two things. One is a feeling. It's a feeling that your client matters, that goes to good client service, to how you treat the profession. If client service is important, you treat the client like they're the most important thing in the world, and you let them know, I got this, I'm getting back to you. That feeling. You are the most important thing to me. Builds trust, and in an attorney-client relationship, that trust is so critical, especially when things go wrong. This is what we've been talking about with the value of personal relationships. But I think there's also a more concrete and objective reason: the last two clients I've had as an in-house attorney both move very, very fast. They're both in crypto, or frontier industries, and the ground moves underneath you every single day when you go to work. That's the pace we're operating at. Separate from it just being good client service that conveys the right feeling, this is the speed at which your client is operating. There may be clients where that's not the expectation. It's never been the case for me, my speed has always been very fast. But meeting your clients where they are, that's part of the job, and my clients move fast, so I have to move fast.
Khurram Naik: You mentioned trust. That responsiveness is a proxy for trust. I can imagine the ways it's important for people to trust your outside counsel, and the way you want the flow of permission to go in that direction. How does a trusted relationship influence things in the other direction? What does it influence in how you interact, what you communicate, with outside counsel?
Matt Turetzky: I'm sorry, let me just make sure I'm understanding this. I think the beginning of the question was talking about trust going one way, and I'm not sure which way it was.
Khurram Naik: So I can better picture what it's like to be outside counsel. The way that not having high enough trust could impact how they service in-house counsel, what they communicate. But what's the impact. Or conversely, let's flip it on its head. In a high-trust scenario, I can imagine the ways outside counsel are able to communicate and service their in-house clients. What happens in a high-trust scenario. What does high trust do on your end, and what does outside counsel get from you?
Matt Turetzky: Well, for one thing, certainly a longer leash and more autonomy, and in a way that gives them more freedom to do their job really well. I recognize there's a cost if I'm too in the weeds with my outside counsel, too directing, too much in the mix. If I become part of the work product itself, that work product is probably not the best expression of what those lawyers are capable of, because I'm constantly over their shoulder in a way that could be counterproductive. So there's a balance I have to strike. But once I'm in a relationship where we've been in the trenches together, done a number of briefs together, done trial prep together, done all these things, then it allows me to step back and provide more strategic guidance and focus on other things. It gives me more leverage. Not just giving outside counsel the freedom to execute, but leverage internally, which allows me to focus more on what's important to the business, how do we land this with this person, how do we incorporate inputs from all these different teams, rather than the brief needing to start with this point or that legal argument. It's the strategic versus the tactical, and in a perfect world I'd spend most of my time working with outside counsel on the strategic and not as much on the tactical. But that takes time before I'm able to focus more on business strategy and less on individual litigation tactics.
Khurram Naik: Yes. And then something else that was interesting when we talked was how you inverted a weakness into a strength. As a litigator, it's perceived as a weakness not to want to read, not to be, say, an avid reader, but it seems like you flipped that.
Matt Turetzky: Yeah, that's right. Confession. I don't like to read for fun, which I think is rare for litigators. I mean, I read a lot, obviously, I'm a litigator, it'd be strange if I wasn't. But I don't sit down with a three-hundred-page book on the weekend and put my feet up on the couch. That's just not what I do for fun. What I've found over time is that it's less that I don't like reading and more that I don't like reading bad writing. If I'm reading something and it's choppy, or I'm not following it, I get bored and frustrated. It's not easy to write well, it takes time. Most of what my outside counsel delivers to me is too long, too fluffy, too convoluted, doesn't get to the point. I think that aversion to reading stuff that's challenging to read has made me a much better editor. It's made me understand this is the message we need to get across, this is how we get the message across. When I've worked with outside counsel on briefs, I probably spend more time on the first sentence than any other sentence in the brief. Five to ten minutes just on that first sentence, the very first thing the law clerk or the judge is going to read. Then I probably spend as much as thirty minutes on the introduction, and another ten minutes on the rest of the brief. So I'm devoting eighty or ninety percent of my editing time to the beginning of the brief, and the reason is that's your first impression, that's your opportunity to persuade the reader to keep reading. This is interesting, keep going, but wait, there's more. That's what the introduction is for. When I was a junior associate, I'd write these really formulaic introductions, formulaic briefs. I look back on some of the stuff I wrote and I'm kind of embarrassed by it. It's not interesting to read. It wasn't going to capture the law clerk or the judge. It was good enough, got a winning record along the way, but man, there's really an opportunity for improvement there. As I've gotten further along, particularly becoming an in-house lawyer where you're reviewing brief after brief, managing a large litigation portfolio, seeing tons of outside counsel work product, now more than at any point in my career I'm laser-focused on what our story is, how we're conveying it, are we using the right tone, are we structuring the brief the right way, what's the message we need to get across. So I consider that now a strength, my editing ability, even though you won't catch me on the weekend with a big book and coffee, the way you'd picture a typical litigator spending their spare time. Probably not me.
Khurram Naik: Are there other weaknesses you've turned into strengths? Or is the interesting thing you're saying that you discovered, or built, this skill of editing as a result of that initial weakness?
Matt Turetzky: Yeah, I think this is somewhat related, but writing. As an in-house lawyer, most of my communication happens over Slack, and if you get me on a topic I'm interested in, Khurram, we could go for several hours, no problem. If I just took the format in which I speak and converted it to writing, it would be impossible to follow. It would be gibberish. We're having a coherent conversation here, it's going well, hopefully you're following me, hopefully your listeners are following me, but if we just took the transcript and put it into a Slack message, this would probably read as the most ineffective form of communication in the history of communication. So one of the things I think I've gotten really good at is communicating complex legal concepts, difficult decisions, into a very short, decision-ready format. One that executives and clients can easily turn into action, or follow-up questions that don't go down rabbit holes we don't need to go down, but really zero in on the issues worthy of further discussion. That took a lot of time. Certainly when I started as an in-house lawyer, I wasn't good at this. It took a number of reps. Teeing something up over Slack, not getting an answer, not getting resolution, not getting a decision, having things pile up, then having to go into meeting after meeting to convey what's really going on. And realizing that the problem wasn't that I didn't have the answer or the right analysis, the problem was I wasn't teeing up the decision-makers to decide as easily as I could. I think I've gotten a lot better at that over the last five years.
Khurram Naik: So what changed? I imagine from the outset maybe the number one rule is brevity. Okay, I see that, that makes sense. So brevity aside, let's go to the number two rule. What is it that changed, and I'm sure initially you were brief and succinct and said, this is going to help someone act on this in a short period of time, and you found people weren't resonating with that. What's the number two principle you're using now. What's making your work more actionable?
Matt Turetzky: So two things. First, it's important to know what your story is in a single sentence. In any piece of communication, doesn't matter if it's a brief, a Slack message, an email, whatever. What's the thing you're trying to convey in a single sentence? Lawyers will fall into the trap of writing a forty-five word sentence. Don't do that. Really try to figure out what the thing you're trying to convey is, very short, hopefully fifteen words at most. Once you have that. That's one tactical step. The other is, once I've got a piece of written work product in front of me, whether it's my own writing I'm editing or someone else's, I'm looking, especially in the introduction or the beginning, at whether every single word is doing work in those sentences. If I've got a fifteen-word sentence, I'm scrutinizing every single one. Is there a preposition there, did we nominalize something that should have been a verb. Really beating up on every single word, to get to a place where the writing is very high signal, very low noise. And that goes hand in hand with brevity. If you write in twenty-five, thirty, thirty-five word sentences over and over, and every single sentence starts with a transition word, it's going to be really challenging for your reader to follow you. It'll be much easier if you have several short sentences that go in a certain cadence, then maybe a long sentence at the end, or a long sentence up front followed by several short sentences. Mixing it up with a rhythm and a cadence, rather than just piling all your ideas into a data dump. That's part of your job as a writer. Figuring out how to get the ideas from your head into someone else's with as little packet loss as possible. That's really what you're doing with the English language, and I think of my job like that. I'm trying to plant an idea in someone else's head, and the English language is this really imperfect medium I have to do it with, but it's the tool I've got. I guess the other thing, apart from whether every word is doing justice, is I tend to scrutinize the use of adverbs and adjectives. If you looked at my Claude instructions, you'd see no adverbs, no adjectives, no em dashes unless absolutely necessary. Really trying to let the verbs and nouns do the work. It's really challenging when you're a litigator, because you have so much to say, so many ideas you want to get out, and you have to exercise restraint, because when you're writing something, you're trying to be very precise, and that's very hard. You need to bring a lot of scrutiny to the words you're going to put on the page.
Khurram Naik: You mentioned this earlier in the context of the Supreme Court decisions. That these are asymmetric bets you're making. So why not take the asymmetric bet, you said, and your career has invited a number of those. Talk me through the asymmetric bets you see in your career.
Matt Turetzky: Sure. I'll go through a couple. I was at Sheppard Mullin for about five years. That's where I spent most of my associate years, most of that time in their Washington, D.C. office, and I spent one year in San Francisco. And when I came to San Francisco, the thinking there was that I was living in Washington, D.C., in a government contracts practice I'd kind of fallen into. That wasn't what I wanted to be doing my whole career. What I really wanted to be doing was litigation, ideally litigation for Bay Area tech companies, which was where I wanted to be coming out of law school, but that wasn't where I landed in my first job. I ended up in this government contracts world. When we came to San Francisco, I wasn't able to transition my practice in the direction I wanted, and by that point I was already a six- or seven-year associate. And Khurram, you're a recruiter, you've read your own blog posts, you know how hard it is for a six- or seven-year to lateral over to another law firm. It's tough. I'd interviewed with a number of other large firms, and those interviews all went well, my goal being to transition my practice to something more Bay Area focused, but my timing just didn't line up with those firms' models. I finally got a call from a recruiter who told me about a law firm just being started by a lawyer who'd been a partner at Boies Schiller and had led litigation at Tesla and SolarCity before that, and I'd get to join as their first associate. It sounded like a totally made-up job. Like, there's no way this exists. It was very real. I ended up joining the Norton Law Firm in September 2018. When I made that decision, I'd already done good work at Sheppard Mullin and had a good reputation there, and a lot of the partners I'd worked with came to me and said, are you sure you want to take this risk, this seems unusual, what I know about you seems like a large law firm is where you should be, and you're going to go to this brand-new thing, who knows what'll come of it. One partner said to me, have you considered the risk of you leaving? And I responded by saying, have you considered the risk of me staying? What I meant by that was, I was trying to take my career in a certain direction, and while I probably could have stayed at the firm and continued to do good work, continued to be a valuable member of the firm, I would have been a valuable attorney inside of the model they had for me. But the model I had for myself, of what I wanted to do, required me to step outside of that conventional path and figure out how to transition, what's the best way to move my practice toward litigation for Bay Area tech clients. It was so obvious, once I'd interviewed with Fred and Bree, who started the firm, that they were the lawyers I needed to be working with. A hundred and ten percent, I was going to get the experience of working with a whole bunch of tech clients, we'd probably do more trials, we'd have a different economic model that would probably make it easier for us to develop business. So as an asymmetric bet, if it went really well, it was going to go really well. But I think the folks at the time saw it as unconventional, and they seemed to think there was this dramatic downside to me stepping off the ordinary associate-to-BigLaw-partner ladder, and what they hadn't considered was that if that downside materialized, if I went to the firm and it didn't work out, I was going to figure out the next thing, whatever that was. It's not like your career just ends, you have the opportunity to do something else. But I saw it as, if I stuck around, the likelihood I'd be able to transition my practice in the direction I wanted was very, very low, and the likelihood I'd successfully transition my practice to tech litigation, something more entrepreneurial, was very, very high by joining the Norton firm. And that turned out to be right. I did a lot of great litigation work there for a number of fantastic tech companies. The firm has grown considerably since I was there. I think they now have about twenty lawyers. Being the first associate is kind of a point of pride for me personally. It's still a lot of fun to go back to the office and talk about the old days, when it was just the three of us in a small office in Oakland, and now they're in a big corporate office right in the middle of downtown Oakland. And all that work I did with them led me to one of their clients, a company called Coinbase, and the rest is history. After four years at Coinbase, I'm now leading litigation for Kraken. But that all was possible because I made that asymmetric bet. That's one example, there are others along the way, but I should probably stop there, because I think that's the big one, certainly a huge inflection point in my career, where I really took that bet on myself.
Khurram Naik: Something that's becoming a theme on the podcast is lawyers practicing at the edge, and I think that's why I was particularly interested in having you on, because crypto is at the edge, and that's where you've gained a lot of experience that will be less common. The Supreme Court decisions you had, among other experiences. And earlier you also mentioned you don't know what comes next, that it's going to be relationship-driven. Part of my question then. For people at the edge, is it that once you've hit on something that's grown, you're at the edge and now the edge is the middle, and you can take up space in that middle? Maybe there's a better analogy, going from the edge to the middle isn't quite the only thing, but the point is you've hit on a thing. Your thesis, your variable, is crypto. This is going to endure, companies like Kraken are going to grow, companies like that are going to grow, fine. So I guess the question is, is your instinct to stay with the thing. Another way I've put this before is, you've hit a gold mine, and one takeaway is, there's a ton of gold in this gold mine, I've got to dig more of this gold mine. Another takeaway is, I hit a gold mine, there must be other gold mines around here. So is your takeaway, at this point, of course it can change, that crypto is the thing where your experience is going to be so valuable, and that's what you love to do, be valuable through that expertise? Or is the thing you really want to value and cultivate your ability to take those asymmetric bets, and is that the next thing for you to pursue, whatever is at the edge again?
Matt Turetzky: Yeah, it's definitely the latter. I love crypto, and if I spend the rest of my career in crypto, I think I'll be super happy, and we'll have a fantastic ride. This is a fantastic industry, I love the people in it, and if I'm fortunate enough to be in it for the rest of my career, that would be great. That said, the way I think about myself is as a generalist, not a specialist. My whole career path has been specialist to generalist. I fell into this hyper-specialized practice at the start of my career that I didn't even know existed when I started law school, called government contracts. How is that its own practice area? Well, go to D.C., there are plenty of government contracts lawyers, it's definitely its own thing, a very complex area of the law, and there are a lot of interesting issues, especially now with the advent of defense tech. But I never saw myself as a fill-in-the-blank lawyer. Maybe the closest thing to a specialist was how I saw myself as a litigator. You graduate law school, you have to make that decision at the outset, during OCI, do you want to do transactional work or litigation, a weird fork in the road you have to make before you know anything. My choice was litigation. I think that was the right one, I think it reflects what I'm interested in. And despite having an interest in a wide range of legal subjects, not just finance or crypto. I took securities regulation in law school, but I also looked into IP and copyright and antitrust and other areas of law. I just kept pushing myself down that generalist path. Even now, as the head of litigation for Kraken, my title is deputy general counsel, and that word "general" is a really important qualifier for what I do. I manage the litigation team and run litigation for the company, but I get all sorts of weird, squirrely questions all the time that have nothing to do with litigation: commercial questions, regulatory, IP. And you just have to figure it out. That's the fun part about being an in-house lawyer, if you like being a generalist, if you like digging in and figuring out the answer rather than just knowing it reflexively because you've done this exact thing four hundred and seventy times before. Instead you have a framework and first principles you start from to solve a problem, without knowing where the process is going to take you, but confident you're going to solve the problem. That's much more exciting to me. That's why I became a lawyer, that's the path I'll keep going down. If it keeps me in crypto, great, and if it doesn't, that's fine too.
Khurram Naik: It's such a good point, because your career embodies that path to generalist. You've taken these bets on yourself to figure things out, and it just keeps happening, this flywheel where you have a broader set of issues you've seen before, which means you'll be able to solve things going forward. We've talked a lot on the show about what the specialist flywheel is, and how valuable it is, but now I've got a better sense of what the generalist flywheel looks like from your path.
Matt Turetzky: I think that's right, and I also had the right mentors, people to learn from along the way. Thinking back to my time at the Norton law firm, Fred Norton and Bree Hann built that firm with the principles and approach they wanted their ideal law firm to have, and one of them was this: if you want to work for a firm that does one specific thing really well, over and over, that's fantastic, but that's not this firm, that's not what we do. We're a litigation boutique, we solve all sorts of problems when they get to the dispute stage, not just antitrust litigation. That was exciting to me, not only because it was different from the model I'd been shown before, but because it told me I wasn't crazy. Going back to that partner who said, have you considered the risk of you leaving? What if I'm not crazy, what if this bet isn't such a crazy risk, what if the only thing standing in the way of the path I wanted for myself was me, and I just had to make the decision to jump in and go for it? Because here were two very successful lawyers, with what you could argue is a more traditional career path: associate at a large law firm, partner at a large law firm, go in-house. That was their path before they started the firm, and then they started the firm. That's probably the break with convention. I thought, if these two lawyers I look up to, who are more successful than me, further along in their careers than me, can make this bet and are looking to hire someone like me to make it with them, why not, why can't I? So rejecting the boxes people try to put you in is a critical muscle to build if you're trying to break away from career paths that are preordained or expected, which was absolutely the direction I was headed.
Khurram Naik: I think that gets at the essence of what's interesting about your path. The unconventional nature of it, and how you had to tune into your own judgment calls as you progressed. We talked about how you did that subsequently, and I think it's very admirable, and could be valuable for other lawyers to hear about those options. So, did we accomplish what we were hoping to accomplish with this conversation?
Matt Turetzky: Awesome. Well, you know, we said when we spoke on the phone that we could easily fill two hours with this, and I just looked down at my watch, and it looks like we did.