Checkbox Appoints Somya Kaushik as Chief Legal Officer to Advance a New Operating Model for Legal in the AI Era

Veteran legal leader to oversee Checkbox’s global legal function while helping redefine how in-house legal teams operate

NEW YORK, NY — April 16 — Checkbox, the AI Legal Front Door platform, today announced the appointment of Somya Kaushik as Chief Legal Officer. In this role, Kaushik will lead Checkbox’s global legal function—overseeing legal strategy, governance, and operations—while helping drive the company’s mission to transform how in-house legal teams are expected to operate: embedded, proactive, and built for scale.

Kaushik joins Checkbox from Mitratech Holdings, Inc., where she most recently served as Associate General Counsel, leading enterprise legal strategy across AI, product, privacy, security, IP, and compliance. She previously served as General Counsel at Mineral Inc. and is the founder of Esq.Me, one of the first legal document marketplaces in the United States.

Prior to going in-house, Kaushik was a commercial trial attorney in NYC and Portland, Oregon, where she gained insight into how the practice of legal heavily depends on the business of legal and operations.

Across these roles, Kaushik has seen firsthand how expectations of legal have evolved—and where the operating model has failed to keep pace.

“Legal is expected to be strategic, but it’s still set up to react,” said Kaushik. “Outdated structures, fragmented workflows, and manual processes make it difficult to evolve. What drew me to Checkbox is that it solves this at the system level—bringing an operating layer that gives legal teams control and visibility over all legal work. Many teams are working on an old operating system, and it’s time to reboot and upgrade to meet the demands of the future.”

Many legal tech solutions—CLM, copilots, redlining tools, and AI assistants—optimize how legal work gets done after it arrives, but don’t protect the legal team by addressing how work should be captured, routed, or reduced in the first place. Having a first line of defense would give legal teams the ability to prioritize on innovation, strategic projects and critical impact to the business.”

Checkbox addresses this challenge by building a centralized operating layer for legal—structuring intake, orchestrating workflows, and governing how work flows across the legal tech stack. Legal teams can automate low-value work, and focus on being strategic partners to the business.

“Somya’s perspective reflects exactly how we believe legal needs to evolve,” said Evan Wong, CEO and Co-Founder of Checkbox. “Having led legal at scale, she understands both the limitations of today’s approach and what’s required to move the industry forward. She will play a critical role in leading our legal function and shaping how modern legal teams look and operate.”