Chapter 04 · About
Built by David Rudin. He’s sat in your chair.
foundational.law is built to deliver what in-house counsel needs, by someone who spent two decades providing it inside a large technology company. Framing the question, owning the risk, making the call: that experience is the foundation this model is built on.
Practicing law at scale.
For more than two decades, David Rudin has built systems that let a small legal team answer an enormous volume of questions without slowing the business down. Each time the old way couldn't keep up, he built a new one. foundational.law is the latest.
He spent those two decades at Microsoft as an Assistant General Counsel, leading the Open Source and Standards Legal Team. Working with the company's Open Source Program Office, he took legal review from a few dozen requests a month to hundreds of thousands, so the questions didn't slow the engineers down. That is decision support at scale, and it is the same problem this firm exists to solve for teams that don't have a Microsoft behind them.
The pattern repeats in the infrastructure he built along the way. He founded the Joint Development Foundation, using Series LLC structures to create a “consortium-in-a-box” that lets new standards organizations launch in days rather than months; it now hosts thirty-six projects, including the Alliance for Open Media, Overture Maps, and C2PA, and is part of the Linux Foundation. He led the Open Web Foundation agreements, and created the Community Specification License to bring standards work into the Git-based workflows developers already use. Each one takes a process that used to take months and compresses it, without giving up the rigor.
What changed is AI. It reshapes what a small team of senior lawyers can do, and David left Microsoft to build a firm around it. The through-line is the same as ever: get the knowledge right once, and the answers come fast enough to be useful.
Experienced counsel, directly.
You work with senior counsel on every matter. No pyramid, no re-explaining your business to a new associate each engagement, and no layer between the person who understands your question and the person answering it. Because the same person builds the infrastructure the firm practices with, the tools answer to the practice rather than the other way around.
Contact us.
If this is the kind of work your business needs, we’d like to hear from you.