About

I work with investors and startup founders who don’t have access to full-time lawyers. My clients are executives who want help structuring their personal venture or project investments, maybe for the first time, and want help getting the legal structure right. I also work with startup founders who want help building a robust legal foundation and enabling businesses to grow.

After more than 10 years working as a lawyer in Asia, I left a JPMorgan legal job to join a four-person startup team in Palo Alto. I spent a year driving two health tech projects forward, translating the vision of the founder to the developer team and speaking directly with our early users. My perspective as a lawyer was forever altered. I had experienced the challenges that operators face firsthand.

When the funding ran out, I moved to Singapore with something most corporate lawyers don’t have — direct experience of what it’s like when a startup doesn’t make it. After working for a few Standard Chartered Ventures startups, ByteDance, and MUFG, I realised that I missed the pace of work for investors and startups. I wanted to be a part of the exciting work they were doing in bringing new products to market. This led me to start Curve Contracts.

AI can now draft a decent agreement in one go. Most lawyers see this as a threat. Rather than fight the technology and try to protect the traditional lawyer territory, I see embracing new technology as a better way to practise law. A technology-enabled lawyer can learn more quickly and spend more time understanding the client’s business. That means more time to think and exercise judgement than assembly-line drafting.

I’m on my third iteration of building a personal AI assistant on my own server and I’m relocating to France this year.

If you’d like to work together or just say hello, email me at aris [at] arismilentis [dot] com.