Teresa Goody Guillén of Bellementis PLLC and of SophieLex participates in a recorded conversation for theCUBE and NYSE Wired series Crypto Trailblazers on the intersection of artificial intelligence, AI, legal technology and digital asset regulation. Guillén brings more than two decades of traditional finance and regulatory experience. They explain SophieLex's non-frontier large language model, LLM, approach and frame how law firms adopt AI while preserving rigorous legal reasoning.
Guillén critiques overreliance on frontier LLMs and emphasizes local open-source models, lawyer-specific agents and workflow automation to reduce administrative burden. They note that SophieLex embeds lawyer reasoning and enables scalable practice without replacing lawyers. They also highlight regulatory priorities such as transparency around leverage, modular risk frameworks for digital assets and coordinated engagement between the Securities and Exchange Commission, SEC and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, CFTC to clarify market frameworks.
This segment explores practical factors to consider for law firms implementing AI, including governance, model selection, compliance and workflow integration for legal practice and digital asset markets.
Forgot Password
Almost there!
We just sent you a verification email. Please verify your account to gain access to
theCUBE + NYSE Wired: Crypto Trailblazers. If you don’t think you received an email check your
spam folder.
Sign in to theCUBE + NYSE Wired: Crypto Trailblazers.
In order to sign in, enter the email address you used to registered for the event. Once completed, you will receive an email with a verification link. Open this link to automatically sign into the site.
Register For theCUBE + NYSE Wired: Crypto Trailblazers
Please fill out the information below. You will recieve an email with a verification link confirming your registration. Click the link to automatically sign into the site.
You’re almost there!
We just sent you a verification email. Please click the verification button in the email. Once your email address is verified, you will have full access to all event content for theCUBE + NYSE Wired: Crypto Trailblazers.
I want my badge and interests to be visible to all attendees.
Checking this box will display your presense on the attendees list, view your profile and allow other attendees to contact you via 1-1 chat. Read the Privacy Policy. At any time, you can choose to disable this preference.
Select your Interests!
add
Upload your photo
Uploading..
OR
Connect via Twitter
Connect via Linkedin
EDIT PASSWORD
Share
Forgot Password
Almost there!
We just sent you a verification email. Please verify your account to gain access to
theCUBE + NYSE Wired: Crypto Trailblazers. If you don’t think you received an email check your
spam folder.
Sign in to theCUBE + NYSE Wired: Crypto Trailblazers.
In order to sign in, enter the email address you used to registered for the event. Once completed, you will receive an email with a verification link. Open this link to automatically sign into the site.
Sign in to gain access to theCUBE + NYSE Wired: Crypto Trailblazers
Please sign in with LinkedIn to continue to theCUBE + NYSE Wired: Crypto Trailblazers. Signing in with LinkedIn ensures a professional environment.
Teresa Goody Guillén of Bellementis PLLC and of SophieLex participates in a recorded conversation for theCUBE and NYSE Wired series Crypto Trailblazers on the intersection of artificial intelligence, AI, legal technology and digital asset regulation. Guillén brings more than two decades of traditional finance and regulatory experience. They explain SophieLex's non-frontier large language model, LLM, approach and frame how law firms adopt AI while preserving rigorous legal reasoning.
Guillén critiques overreliance on frontier LLMs and emphasizes local open-source models, lawyer-specific agents and workflow automation to reduce administrative burden. They note that SophieLex embeds lawyer reasoning and enables scalable practice without replacing lawyers. They also highlight regulatory priorities such as transparency around leverage, modular risk frameworks for digital assets and coordinated engagement between the Securities and Exchange Commission, SEC and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, CFTC to clarify market frameworks.
This segment explores practical factors to consider for law firms implementing AI, including governance, model selection, compliance and workflow integration for legal practice and digital asset markets.
>> Palo Alto Studio, connecting Silicon Valley and Wall Street. I'm John Furrier, your host, here with Dave Vellante, my co-host.
Gemma Allen
>> Welcome match to theCUBE Studio here at the New York Stock Exchange. I'm Gemma Allen with NYSE Wired's Crypto Trailblazers. Join me now for conversation on the world of AI and the legal industry. It's Teresa Goody Guillén, founder of Bellementis PLLC and also CEO and founder of SophieLex. Welcome, Teresa.
Teresa Goody Guillén
>> Thank you. Thank you so much for having me.
Gemma Allen
>> I think the lower thirds for you is a mouthful because you have had a lot going on this last year, right? You've essentially founded two companies at the same time, both of which are somewhat of a synergy for the other. Talk me through Bellementis PLLC and SophieLex.
Teresa Goody Guillén
>> Yes, thanks. It's been really exciting. Being able to take advantage of a lot of the technology that's out there, because I've been working with these innovators and visionaries for such a long time, that now to be able to feel like I'm entering into that space a little bit with them and being one of the builders is a lot of fun too. Bellementis is a law firm, roughly out of a beautiful mind as this beautiful craft of the law, the way that I view it, and how AI can make this craft even more beautiful, or I could do the opposite depending on how you use the AI. And then at the same time, launching an AI legal platform that would be available to everyone. Initially, the beta testing and everything is going through SophieLex and a handful of people, other lawyers and law firms that want to be beta testers with us, but it approaches the law completely differently than any of the current systems in AI that you're seeing out there. It does not use any of the frontier models as proprietary AI, and fully secure. I basically have been solving my own problem and how to do sophisticated elite legal practice with AI. So the system is being built to implement some of my reasoning and the thinking, how to think through some of these issues and think like a lawyer, because thinking like a lawyer is much different type of analysis and process.
Gemma Allen
>> Well, I love a founder story that starts with necessity as the mother of invention, because they're often some of the best stories we know in here. Talk to me a little bit about your background though. You've had a very interesting career. You have been knee-deep in the world at TradFi and DeFi for quite a while, a complex space with a lot of change. Bring me up to speed to the moment you decided to found these two companies.
Teresa Goody Guillén
>> Yeah. So I've been in traditional financial markets for about 25 years. I worked at the Securities and Exchange Commission. I mentored under former SEC chairman Harvey Pitt for many years, who was mentored under former SEC chairman himself. So there's like this lineage of SEC chairman, which is why my traditional securities understandings go back much longer than my age, because I would sit with Stanley Sporkin and Harvey Pitt and listen to all these stories about when the FCPA was thought of and created and just going back to the '40s really. So understanding the history is very important because we learn from history and history does repeat itself. So a lot of what we're seeing isn't terribly new. It's new in the innovation in the tech, but it's not new as in this type of transition and modernization of financial instruments. And then while I was doing that, I was his chief operating officer and managing director. I went and I got an MBA as well.
Gemma Allen
>> Wow.
Teresa Goody Guillén
>> And then I decided I wanted to launch my first law firm, so I did that. My first transaction was a swaps transaction with the underlying asset being a digital asset in 2015. So no swaps regime, and nobody could figure out if it was a commodity or a security. I solved that by having it an index that was broad-based, and so there was some regulatory certainty. I'm generally good at accomplishing whatever the goal is of a client. We might have to take a different path.
Gemma Allen
>> Wow.
Teresa Goody Guillén
>> Yeah.
Gemma Allen
>> Teresa, you've certainly been a busy woman, that's for sure. You're about to get a lot busier based on these two companies you've founded. But let's talk for a second about a comment you made there around actually when we really boil things down, this is just the next wave of progress, the next generation of technology and financial markets. Because I guess, when we think about the crypto space, there is this narrative that it's highly disruptive, that it's somewhat eclectic, that it's a little bit peripheral, and it is quite new. We see folks like Jamie Dimon have very strong opinions on it, for example, and those opinions carry a lot of weight. It's an interesting regulatory time in the space. There was a lot of promise, especially around the CLARITY Act and others, and we haven't really seen the progress yet. I mean, there's a lot of hope we will this summer. What are your thoughts? Where do you think that breakdown in truth versus narrative happens a little bit when we think about the world of DeFi?
Teresa Goody Guillén
>> Mm-hmm. Yeah. Well, I think there's still some disconnect between traditional financial market participants and crypto market participants. They have a lot to learn from each other, and that's why working in this space and having such depth of understanding of the law, but also the technology and how these things actually function, is so important. I think there's also fear. When you have like a traditional system and there's so much built around it, the idea of changing that can be scary, and change can be difficult. But just with every industrial revolution that we've gone through, there's been advancements. And we have the same thing here with crypto. I think crypto can learn from history to see how to not repeat that with DeFi, the necessity of having transparency into margin and leverage. This is a repeat of what we saw in the '20s with trusts, with commodity trust. So we can learn those lessons. But crypto offers so much because it's building out trust. So it's trust in a new way that we don't have in traditional financial markets, which makes it a lot more efficient and a lot more cost-effective, particularly for retail investors, but also for institutional investors as well, and it can flatten the entire system. So that transparency, that truth, a lot of it takes out the need for the intermediary and the middle person, which can be scary, but also, I mean, it offers the ability to do that, which has so many more benefits than having that unnecessary intermediary. Right now what we're seeing is people are doing both. So as we're trying to flatten and take out the intermediaries, then they're doing the intermediary process still in the backend. So it's like continuing to do the paper, even though it's not really necessary, just to belt and suspenders for a while to make sure that the crypto and the digital aspect is working properly.
Gemma Allen
>> So you must have worked across a couple of very interesting clients and matters over the last decade or so in the crypto space, and absolutely, there's learnings I think that we can take and best practices that can be applied. For those companies or clients of yours that you feel are kind of getting things right, what does that look like? Does it involve more paperwork, more administration, better communication, more engagement? Where do you see the disconnect versus the best practices?
Teresa Goody Guillén
>> Yeah. Those clients are generally willing to look at it from a much less myopic view. I think oftentimes what happens is the business people come up with something that they think makes sense. They give it to lawyers, and then the lawyers just review what they're given, and their comments are really more grammatical and only based on what it is that they're seeing. But those clients who will work with me to say, "Let's step back and let's look at this entire structure. Does this make sense? Is this the right structure for this market or this product? And what are the goals?" And then find the most efficient way or the most effective way to accomplish that goal, and willing to go and ask for that exemptive relief if that's what it is, and go before the commission and ask them for different things. I mean, the commission, the SEC can basically exempt anything. The expansive power of the exemptions under the '33 and '34 act are immense. I've been doing these exemptions for like 20 years, and so requesting exemptive relief. So it's no different. It's just with a different type of product. Now we have the SEC and the CFTC working together, and wanting to build together and reassess and look, do these definitions make sense? Do these frameworks make sense? Which is exactly that, that's the exact same approach that my clients generally take in working with me, because I'm not going to be as myopic in just reviewing a contract when the contract makes no sense for the structure.
Gemma Allen
>> When we think about the application of the law to the world of crypto, I think it has had somewhat of a challenge because obviously a lot of folks know of it through like FTX and Sam Bankman-Fried, and that created somewhat of a messaging problem too, right? But actually, there is also somewhat of a paradigm shift around how you think about the world of traditional finance versus the world of DeFi, and whether one methodology and modularity applies to the other. Do you think it's a case that there is a lot to yet be uncovered and written? Or are we just trying to kind of like take a square heck and push it into a round hole? What are your thoughts on the legal side of it?
Teresa Goody Guillén
>> Yeah. I think it'll continue to develop, and I'm very optimistic with our current chairman of the SEC and CFTC and how they're approaching it this way. I think because they are seeing exactly and asking those right questions with the swaps and security-based swaps right now, and I think it's even broader than that if you kind of read between the lines of their recent requests for comments. But we have traditional securities and commodities and the way that we look at them, and they were based on certain rights and certain risks. And then the whole purpose of regulation is to kind of correct for some market structural issues, some incentive issue, to align incentives, and just it's a corrective guardrail. Now that we have these digital assets where you can now take these different types of rights that before were intertwined necessarily, separated, and now they're mixed and matched. So you have something that's like part a security risk, part a commodity risk, and something that's overlooked, I think, far too often is the derivatives risk, which is the leverage and the margin kind of requirements, and looking at transparency there that people aren't over leveraged, because that's what can lead to the real cascading down of the markets. And it's that modularization, changes the entire risk structure. Plus, you have some technology on top of it, which can really mitigate risks and change the reason that some types of products were not permitted before, but those risks now don't exist because the technology has basically stalled for various problems. And then the technology also creates other problems. So you have to look at it as something a little different, a paradigm shift.
Gemma Allen
>> It's layered. Let's stay on technology for a second though and let's talk a little bit about SophieLex and what you're building there, because I am somebody who worries a lot about this next generation of knowledge worker, folks that are leaving college trying to get associate roles at law firms, accountants, all of these things that we came to just know and expect. I truly worry, I'm like, "How is this next generation going to learn?" Companies like Harvey obviously present a great opportunity from the perspective of an agent replacing an associate at a much lower cost, but again, there's challenges, right? How do you think about that in building SophieLex? And how do you think about the unique selling point of a technology like this, an industry that's become very LLM-driven?
Teresa Goody Guillén
>> Yes. Well, I think that part of the reason I'm building SophieLex is because of this problem that I see in the legal industry and the use of the frontier models. They're kind of being layered on top of the legal industry, which is not how you practice sophisticated elite practice. So that's something for basically standardized things when you're trying to find like, what does everybody else do? But when you're doing more of a sophisticated practice, this vector predictive model is not effective. So I think it's a false sense of confidence in that what the models actually do, and they're over-relied on in a way that leads to not the best solutions for clients. So I've seen the quality of lawyering significantly diminish just by lawyers who don't know how to properly use it. The people who are starting a lot of these firms are more tech and they're very, very brilliant, talented at tech, but sophisticated elite legal practice, there's not a ton of people who do that, right?
Gemma Allen
>> So give me an example of how you use SophieLex in Bellementis. Are you using it for very unique types of discovery? Are you using it to create documents? Give me an example of something that is more niche, but obviously very applicable to a technology like that.
Teresa Goody Guillén
>> Yeah. More of like it's the entire process really. So it's from soup to nuts, it's completely different than anything that's currently on the market because it's literally fixing my problems, which are not just my problems and other people's problems too, like other lawyers. But like you were saying, the need, after working 48 hours straight repeatedly over and over again, there has to be a better way, and there is. So SophieLex is different in that I am fixing a lot of these problems, and it's implementing my reasoning into it.
Gemma Allen
>> Is it like a digital twin of you? Is that a fair way to categorize this?
Teresa Goody Guillén
>> No, there's a component of that, and so that's being developed where each lawyer will be able to have something like that that's more specific to them and they own that IP, but then it's the entire system that's being built. So we're starting first with more of the workflow management, and just saving on administrative costs. Since I started SophieLex, my administrative burden is significantly diminished because of the automation and the use of AI. And they're open source models, so they're local. I built an LLM on my computer, and so it's a local one. So it can use these kinds of things. I vibe code too, but I have engineers who do more, who have developed it further. So it's that automation and the use of AI in a very kind of specific way that's more useful for a lawyer, that enables me to automate things and make sure that nothing falls through the cracks. So the workflows, I mean, I've been doing this for 25 years, and I do litigation investigations and corporate work. So I get both sides of that and how those different workflows need to work. And I've managed tens of millions of dollars of business at the same time. So it's very... You need workflow systems for that to work to function properly.
Gemma Allen
>> That fully understands you and your context, right? Your persona and your context too, which is so important.
Teresa Goody Guillén
>> Yeah, yeah. And then the system I'm so excited for too, because as we're building that, we're fundraising and everything to build that out, is the entire law firm. I know it seems like a big undertaking because it's an entire vertical of the legal market. And that's where all of the lawyers use this, I call it a neuromentist system, because how it all flows through the common brain system. It's highly agentic with specific different types of proprietary agents in the proprietary database. I'm working with the founder of ancestry.com. Paul Allen is a partner with me for building this most comprehensive legal database so that we have that also, that legal database.
Gemma Allen
>> Well, Teresa, it certainly sounds like a very exciting time, and I'm going to be honest, a tiring time for you, but it's wonderful to see this and also, like I said, to see somebody actually take a problem and create a business solution from it, which might have mass obligation. We certainly hope so. What's ahead? Close us out, what does the next 12 months look like for you across these two entities?
Teresa Goody Guillén
>> My hope is that we can just build very quickly SophieLex and then the firm will be able to fully use it. I mean, we've already built up so quickly within two months. We have over 20 people. I do think that you can have a full service firm with about 60 people, which now takes 1,200, and it doesn't replace lawyers, but it amplifies and scales them. So it enables you to do more things. Hopefully, SophieLex is in all law firms and in general counsel's offices, and we see the quality of this beautiful craft. It's one of the first crafts just kind of revive into what it is supposed to be, because that's the defender of our democracy, of our society.
Gemma Allen
>> Sure.
Teresa Goody Guillén
>> That's why SophieLex is Sophia, it's not just my daughter, but means wisdom. And then Lex doesn't just mean law, but it means defender of mankind. So this is like this wise kind of legal system defending mankind, and I hope that what this does is, it's a resource and a tool for all lawyers to be the best that they can be, and we continue this beautiful craft because it's so important.
Gemma Allen
>> Well, Teresa, it's certainly wonderful to see a woman building her own paradigm to meet this next moment. So thanks so much for joining us on theCUBE.
Teresa Goody Guillén
>> Thanks so much for having me.
Gemma Allen
>> I'm Gemma Allen here at theCUBE Studio at the New York Stock Exchange. It is NYSE Wired's Crypto Trailblazers. Thanks for watching.
>> Palo Alto Studio, connecting Silicon Valley and Wall Street. I'm John Furrier, your host, here with Dave Vellante, my co-host.
Gemma Allen
>> Welcome match to theCUBE Studio here at the New York Stock Exchange. I'm Gemma Allen with NYSE Wired's Crypto Trailblazers. Join me now for conversation on the world of AI and the legal industry. It's Teresa Goody Guillén, founder of Bellementis PLLC and also CEO and founder of SophieLex. Welcome, Teresa.
Teresa Goody Guillén
>> Thank you. Thank you so much for having me.
Gemma Allen
>> I think the lower thirds for you is a mouthful because you have had a lot going on this last year, right? You've essentially founded two companies at the same time, both of which are somewhat of a synergy for the other. Talk me through Bellementis PLLC and SophieLex.
Teresa Goody Guillén
>> Yes, thanks. It's been really exciting. Being able to take advantage of a lot of the technology that's out there, because I've been working with these innovators and visionaries for such a long time, that now to be able to feel like I'm entering into that space a little bit with them and being one of the builders is a lot of fun too. Bellementis is a law firm, roughly out of a beautiful mind as this beautiful craft of the law, the way that I view it, and how AI can make this craft even more beautiful, or I could do the opposite depending on how you use the AI. And then at the same time, launching an AI legal platform that would be available to everyone. Initially, the beta testing and everything is going through SophieLex and a handful of people, other lawyers and law firms that want to be beta testers with us, but it approaches the law completely differently than any of the current systems in AI that you're seeing out there. It does not use any of the frontier models as proprietary AI, and fully secure. I basically have been solving my own problem and how to do sophisticated elite legal practice with AI. So the system is being built to implement some of my reasoning and the thinking, how to think through some of these issues and think like a lawyer, because thinking like a lawyer is much different type of analysis and process.
Gemma Allen
>> Well, I love a founder story that starts with necessity as the mother of invention, because they're often some of the best stories we know in here. Talk to me a little bit about your background though. You've had a very interesting career. You have been knee-deep in the world at TradFi and DeFi for quite a while, a complex space with a lot of change. Bring me up to speed to the moment you decided to found these two companies.
Teresa Goody Guillén
>> Yeah. So I've been in traditional financial markets for about 25 years. I worked at the Securities and Exchange Commission. I mentored under former SEC chairman Harvey Pitt for many years, who was mentored under former SEC chairman himself. So there's like this lineage of SEC chairman, which is why my traditional securities understandings go back much longer than my age, because I would sit with Stanley Sporkin and Harvey Pitt and listen to all these stories about when the FCPA was thought of and created and just going back to the '40s really. So understanding the history is very important because we learn from history and history does repeat itself. So a lot of what we're seeing isn't terribly new. It's new in the innovation in the tech, but it's not new as in this type of transition and modernization of financial instruments. And then while I was doing that, I was his chief operating officer and managing director. I went and I got an MBA as well.
Gemma Allen
>> Wow.
Teresa Goody Guillén
>> And then I decided I wanted to launch my first law firm, so I did that. My first transaction was a swaps transaction with the underlying asset being a digital asset in 2015. So no swaps regime, and nobody could figure out if it was a commodity or a security. I solved that by having it an index that was broad-based, and so there was some regulatory certainty. I'm generally good at accomplishing whatever the goal is of a client. We might have to take a different path.
Gemma Allen
>> Wow.
Teresa Goody Guillén
>> Yeah.
Gemma Allen
>> Teresa, you've certainly been a busy woman, that's for sure. You're about to get a lot busier based on these two companies you've founded. But let's talk for a second about a comment you made there around actually when we really boil things down, this is just the next wave of progress, the next generation of technology and financial markets. Because I guess, when we think about the crypto space, there is this narrative that it's highly disruptive, that it's somewhat eclectic, that it's a little bit peripheral, and it is quite new. We see folks like Jamie Dimon have very strong opinions on it, for example, and those opinions carry a lot of weight. It's an interesting regulatory time in the space. There was a lot of promise, especially around the CLARITY Act and others, and we haven't really seen the progress yet. I mean, there's a lot of hope we will this summer. What are your thoughts? Where do you think that breakdown in truth versus narrative happens a little bit when we think about the world of DeFi?
Teresa Goody Guillén
>> Mm-hmm. Yeah. Well, I think there's still some disconnect between traditional financial market participants and crypto market participants. They have a lot to learn from each other, and that's why working in this space and having such depth of understanding of the law, but also the technology and how these things actually function, is so important. I think there's also fear. When you have like a traditional system and there's so much built around it, the idea of changing that can be scary, and change can be difficult. But just with every industrial revolution that we've gone through, there's been advancements. And we have the same thing here with crypto. I think crypto can learn from history to see how to not repeat that with DeFi, the necessity of having transparency into margin and leverage. This is a repeat of what we saw in the '20s with trusts, with commodity trust. So we can learn those lessons. But crypto offers so much because it's building out trust. So it's trust in a new way that we don't have in traditional financial markets, which makes it a lot more efficient and a lot more cost-effective, particularly for retail investors, but also for institutional investors as well, and it can flatten the entire system. So that transparency, that truth, a lot of it takes out the need for the intermediary and the middle person, which can be scary, but also, I mean, it offers the ability to do that, which has so many more benefits than having that unnecessary intermediary. Right now what we're seeing is people are doing both. So as we're trying to flatten and take out the intermediaries, then they're doing the intermediary process still in the backend. So it's like continuing to do the paper, even though it's not really necessary, just to belt and suspenders for a while to make sure that the crypto and the digital aspect is working properly.
Gemma Allen
>> So you must have worked across a couple of very interesting clients and matters over the last decade or so in the crypto space, and absolutely, there's learnings I think that we can take and best practices that can be applied. For those companies or clients of yours that you feel are kind of getting things right, what does that look like? Does it involve more paperwork, more administration, better communication, more engagement? Where do you see the disconnect versus the best practices?
Teresa Goody Guillén
>> Yeah. Those clients are generally willing to look at it from a much less myopic view. I think oftentimes what happens is the business people come up with something that they think makes sense. They give it to lawyers, and then the lawyers just review what they're given, and their comments are really more grammatical and only based on what it is that they're seeing. But those clients who will work with me to say, "Let's step back and let's look at this entire structure. Does this make sense? Is this the right structure for this market or this product? And what are the goals?" And then find the most efficient way or the most effective way to accomplish that goal, and willing to go and ask for that exemptive relief if that's what it is, and go before the commission and ask them for different things. I mean, the commission, the SEC can basically exempt anything. The expansive power of the exemptions under the '33 and '34 act are immense. I've been doing these exemptions for like 20 years, and so requesting exemptive relief. So it's no different. It's just with a different type of product. Now we have the SEC and the CFTC working together, and wanting to build together and reassess and look, do these definitions make sense? Do these frameworks make sense? Which is exactly that, that's the exact same approach that my clients generally take in working with me, because I'm not going to be as myopic in just reviewing a contract when the contract makes no sense for the structure.
Gemma Allen
>> When we think about the application of the law to the world of crypto, I think it has had somewhat of a challenge because obviously a lot of folks know of it through like FTX and Sam Bankman-Fried, and that created somewhat of a messaging problem too, right? But actually, there is also somewhat of a paradigm shift around how you think about the world of traditional finance versus the world of DeFi, and whether one methodology and modularity applies to the other. Do you think it's a case that there is a lot to yet be uncovered and written? Or are we just trying to kind of like take a square heck and push it into a round hole? What are your thoughts on the legal side of it?
Teresa Goody Guillén
>> Yeah. I think it'll continue to develop, and I'm very optimistic with our current chairman of the SEC and CFTC and how they're approaching it this way. I think because they are seeing exactly and asking those right questions with the swaps and security-based swaps right now, and I think it's even broader than that if you kind of read between the lines of their recent requests for comments. But we have traditional securities and commodities and the way that we look at them, and they were based on certain rights and certain risks. And then the whole purpose of regulation is to kind of correct for some market structural issues, some incentive issue, to align incentives, and just it's a corrective guardrail. Now that we have these digital assets where you can now take these different types of rights that before were intertwined necessarily, separated, and now they're mixed and matched. So you have something that's like part a security risk, part a commodity risk, and something that's overlooked, I think, far too often is the derivatives risk, which is the leverage and the margin kind of requirements, and looking at transparency there that people aren't over leveraged, because that's what can lead to the real cascading down of the markets. And it's that modularization, changes the entire risk structure. Plus, you have some technology on top of it, which can really mitigate risks and change the reason that some types of products were not permitted before, but those risks now don't exist because the technology has basically stalled for various problems. And then the technology also creates other problems. So you have to look at it as something a little different, a paradigm shift.
Gemma Allen
>> It's layered. Let's stay on technology for a second though and let's talk a little bit about SophieLex and what you're building there, because I am somebody who worries a lot about this next generation of knowledge worker, folks that are leaving college trying to get associate roles at law firms, accountants, all of these things that we came to just know and expect. I truly worry, I'm like, "How is this next generation going to learn?" Companies like Harvey obviously present a great opportunity from the perspective of an agent replacing an associate at a much lower cost, but again, there's challenges, right? How do you think about that in building SophieLex? And how do you think about the unique selling point of a technology like this, an industry that's become very LLM-driven?
Teresa Goody Guillén
>> Yes. Well, I think that part of the reason I'm building SophieLex is because of this problem that I see in the legal industry and the use of the frontier models. They're kind of being layered on top of the legal industry, which is not how you practice sophisticated elite practice. So that's something for basically standardized things when you're trying to find like, what does everybody else do? But when you're doing more of a sophisticated practice, this vector predictive model is not effective. So I think it's a false sense of confidence in that what the models actually do, and they're over-relied on in a way that leads to not the best solutions for clients. So I've seen the quality of lawyering significantly diminish just by lawyers who don't know how to properly use it. The people who are starting a lot of these firms are more tech and they're very, very brilliant, talented at tech, but sophisticated elite legal practice, there's not a ton of people who do that, right?
Gemma Allen
>> So give me an example of how you use SophieLex in Bellementis. Are you using it for very unique types of discovery? Are you using it to create documents? Give me an example of something that is more niche, but obviously very applicable to a technology like that.
Teresa Goody Guillén
>> Yeah. More of like it's the entire process really. So it's from soup to nuts, it's completely different than anything that's currently on the market because it's literally fixing my problems, which are not just my problems and other people's problems too, like other lawyers. But like you were saying, the need, after working 48 hours straight repeatedly over and over again, there has to be a better way, and there is. So SophieLex is different in that I am fixing a lot of these problems, and it's implementing my reasoning into it.
Gemma Allen
>> Is it like a digital twin of you? Is that a fair way to categorize this?
Teresa Goody Guillén
>> No, there's a component of that, and so that's being developed where each lawyer will be able to have something like that that's more specific to them and they own that IP, but then it's the entire system that's being built. So we're starting first with more of the workflow management, and just saving on administrative costs. Since I started SophieLex, my administrative burden is significantly diminished because of the automation and the use of AI. And they're open source models, so they're local. I built an LLM on my computer, and so it's a local one. So it can use these kinds of things. I vibe code too, but I have engineers who do more, who have developed it further. So it's that automation and the use of AI in a very kind of specific way that's more useful for a lawyer, that enables me to automate things and make sure that nothing falls through the cracks. So the workflows, I mean, I've been doing this for 25 years, and I do litigation investigations and corporate work. So I get both sides of that and how those different workflows need to work. And I've managed tens of millions of dollars of business at the same time. So it's very... You need workflow systems for that to work to function properly.
Gemma Allen
>> That fully understands you and your context, right? Your persona and your context too, which is so important.
Teresa Goody Guillén
>> Yeah, yeah. And then the system I'm so excited for too, because as we're building that, we're fundraising and everything to build that out, is the entire law firm. I know it seems like a big undertaking because it's an entire vertical of the legal market. And that's where all of the lawyers use this, I call it a neuromentist system, because how it all flows through the common brain system. It's highly agentic with specific different types of proprietary agents in the proprietary database. I'm working with the founder of ancestry.com. Paul Allen is a partner with me for building this most comprehensive legal database so that we have that also, that legal database.
Gemma Allen
>> Well, Teresa, it certainly sounds like a very exciting time, and I'm going to be honest, a tiring time for you, but it's wonderful to see this and also, like I said, to see somebody actually take a problem and create a business solution from it, which might have mass obligation. We certainly hope so. What's ahead? Close us out, what does the next 12 months look like for you across these two entities?
Teresa Goody Guillén
>> My hope is that we can just build very quickly SophieLex and then the firm will be able to fully use it. I mean, we've already built up so quickly within two months. We have over 20 people. I do think that you can have a full service firm with about 60 people, which now takes 1,200, and it doesn't replace lawyers, but it amplifies and scales them. So it enables you to do more things. Hopefully, SophieLex is in all law firms and in general counsel's offices, and we see the quality of this beautiful craft. It's one of the first crafts just kind of revive into what it is supposed to be, because that's the defender of our democracy, of our society.
Gemma Allen
>> Sure.
Teresa Goody Guillén
>> That's why SophieLex is Sophia, it's not just my daughter, but means wisdom. And then Lex doesn't just mean law, but it means defender of mankind. So this is like this wise kind of legal system defending mankind, and I hope that what this does is, it's a resource and a tool for all lawyers to be the best that they can be, and we continue this beautiful craft because it's so important.
Gemma Allen
>> Well, Teresa, it's certainly wonderful to see a woman building her own paradigm to meet this next moment. So thanks so much for joining us on theCUBE.
Teresa Goody Guillén
>> Thanks so much for having me.
Gemma Allen
>> I'm Gemma Allen here at theCUBE Studio at the New York Stock Exchange. It is NYSE Wired's Crypto Trailblazers. Thanks for watching.
John Furrier
Gemma Allen