Welcoming John Kennelly, Cofounder & CCO

We’re excited to announce that John Kennelly is joining Magistrate as Cofounder & Chief Customer Officer.

With over 12 years in customer-facing roles, John has sent thousands of legal agreements to prospective clients. In doing so, he’s also spent what has felt like thousands of hours waiting for talented (but overwhelmed) lawyers to draft the routine paperwork he needed to do his job.

So how did John end up working alongside Harry here at Magistrate?

It starts with John being horrible at roller skating and knocking Harry down at a roller skating rink in San Francisco circa 2016. Despite the collision, John and Harry became fast friends.

John never knew much about what Harry did for work other than he loved practicing law and never had a problem challenging the status quo. Similarly, Harry didn’t realize John had spent over a decade falling victim to the very problem Harry would one day set out to solve with Magistrate.

As you know if you’ve visited our site before, the modern contract is broken.

With this fact as his North Star, Harry used his background as both a software engineer and attorney to start to close the gap between attorneys and big companies who draft 95% of legal documents and the everyday consumers who have no choice but to sign them.

Years later, in October 2022, Harry posted a photo on BeReal.

John took one look at the photo and knew it was time to learn more about what Harry was up to. It didn’t take long for him to learn two things:

1. Magistrate solved a painful problem that John himself experienced many times in his career, and
2. There was a real opportunity to turn a beautiful product into a revenue-generating business, and he was the right person to help make that happen.

After a short stint as an advisor to the company, it became clear that John’s experience aligned nicely with what Harry needed to build this business, and the strongest future for Magistrate was one with John as a full-time cofounder.

To that end, the next chapter of Magistrate is bound by a friendship that started as a chance encounter at a roller skating rink, was reignited by BeReal, and continues today as cofounders.