A real, senior attorney — building the next way to deliver legal work.

Jesse started his career clerking for the Honorable Dora L. Irizarry, a U.S. District Judge and former Chief Judge of the Eastern District of New York. He moved into BigLaw litigation at Blank Rome and Labaton Sucharow, working complex commercial real estate, environmental, and securities-fraud cases on behalf of institutional investors including the New York City Employees' Retirement System.

He spent the early 2010s in a small solo practice handling high-stakes commercial and appellate litigation — including a multi-state consumer-protection action on behalf of sixty-five recent law-school graduates and an amicus brief to the New York Court of Appeals on a high-stakes affordable-housing matter — and earning recognition as a Metro New York Super Lawyer Rising Star in 2012 and 2013.

In 2016 Jesse moved in-house as VP & General Counsel of Common Living, a Series D proptech company. Over the next seven years he reported to the CEO, sat on the Executive and Strategic Committees, and helped grow the business from 25 employees in 2 states to 350 across 10. He closed the company's $40M Series C, $50M Series D, $25M bridge, and $15M venture debt facility, formed more than $100M in joint ventures financing multi-family real estate, and managed every piece of company litigation — including a high-stakes regulatory action resolved by consent decree. The company was acquired in late 2022.

From there he became General Counsel of Everyrealm, a venture-backed virtual-worlds and immersive-media company. He managed four concurrent litigations, led legal due diligence and closing of joint ventures across virtual real estate and IP, and built compliance programs spanning GDPR, CCPA, COPPA, payments, and securities (including security tokens).

In late 2023 Jesse founded Strauss Law PLLC and YFGC.AI, the firm's productized Your Fractional General Counsel™ services. Crain's New York Business named him a 2024 Notable General Counsel. The thesis: senior in-house counsel is wildly valuable but historically only accessible to companies large enough to afford a full-time hire. Combine a senior lawyer with modern AI and you can deliver the same quality of work to ten or twenty companies at once — faster, cheaper, and without the BigLaw billable-hour incentives. He writes about that thesis at Fractionally Yours and built LawyerLoop AI™ to extend the same idea across every practice area he doesn't cover himself.

Jesse is a U.S. and German citizen, qualified to work in both the U.S. and the E.U. He's a founding member of TechGC, the invitation-only peer community for general counsel of technology companies, and is listed in Marquis Who's Who in America. You can follow him on LinkedIn for unfiltered takes. Outside the practice he's a parent, a skier, a New Yorker, and a regular at the city's performing arts venues.