A courtroom teaches a lawyer how to argue. A boardroom teaches a lawyer how to listen. Jessica Hately has spent more than two decades doing both, and somewhere along the way she stopped thinking of law as a profession you practice and started thinking of it as an infrastructure you build.
Today, Jessica is a seasoned legal executive whose career spans public companies, private equity-backed businesses, and high-growth SaaS organizations. Her experience includes corporate governance, mergers and acquisitions, capital markets, legal operations, AI governance, risk management, compliance, global entity management, and cross-border operations. Her career has repeatedly placed her in environments where legal structures needed to grow alongside the businesses they supported.
A Legal Department Built From Nothing
Before her most recent chapter, Jessica spent more than three years, from August 2021 into 2025, as Chief Legal Officer of Top Hat, a growth-stage education technology company. It was there that her range became fully visible.
Top Hat brought her in as its first Chief Legal Officer, with responsibility for all legal functions, after her more than six years at GoDaddy. She brought experience in corporate strategy and worldwide mergers and acquisitions, while helping the company scale its legal capabilities alongside its growth. Her work at Top Hat also included helping the company navigate acquisitions and the expanding legal questions surrounding artificial intelligence.
Six Years at GoDaddy
Jessica’s formative years as a senior legal executive happened at GoDaddy, a publicly traded SaaS and global technology company, where she spent more than six years, beginning in January 2015, climbing through increasingly senior legal roles before becoming Vice President of Legal Affairs. In that final role, she supported the company’s growth strategy, led worldwide mergers and acquisitions, oversaw corporate compliance, and helped expand the legal team internationally and into new lines of business.
Her professional profile describes that experience as including more than $2 billion in cross-border M&A transactions, along with corporate governance, compliance, legal-operations strategy, and cross-border operations.
The LifeLock Years
Her path into public company law began even earlier, at LifeLock, where she spent several years as Senior Corporate Counsel. As one of the company’s early legal hires, she supported work involving corporate governance, securities, mergers and acquisitions, and the company’s development as a public business. Those responsibilities demanded fluency in both legal doctrine and commercial pragmatism, a combination that would define the rest of her career.
Before that, she trained as an associate at two law firms: Fennemore Craig and Greenberg Traurig, building the private-practice foundation for the in-house and strategic legal work that followed.
What the Resume Doesn’t Say
What connects an identity protection company, a global technology company, an education technology company, and a Big Four law-firm initiative is not industry. It is a pattern: Jessica keeps arriving before the structure exists and staying long enough to build it.
Corporate governance, AI governance, legal operations, risk management, compliance, and cross-border operations. These are not specialties so much as they are the scaffolding that modern global companies quietly depend on, and few careers illustrate that scaffolding as completely as hers.
Her experience with KPMG Law US became another expression of that pattern. Rather than simply serving as legal counsel within an established organization, she was part of an effort to build a new U.S. legal-services model within the Big Four environment, bringing together technology-enabled delivery, governance, and cross-border legal operations. KPMG Law US announced her arrival as one of its Directors and Counsel as it established its U.S. legal-services operation. That chapter is now part of her professional history, but it reinforces the same through-line visible across her career: building legal infrastructure for organizations navigating increasing complexity.
Read more : The Architects of Global Compliance, Legal Operations & Cross-Border Growth Transformation
