Kristen Sonday: The Paladin Co-Founder Closing the Justice Gap
Kristen Sonday grew up in New Jersey as a first-generation college student and went on to Princeton before her career took an unusual turn for someone who’d eventually found a legal tech startup. She worked on international criminal matters for the U.S. Department of Justice, spending time on cases connected to Mexico and Central America, before joining the founding team of a New York City tech startup. That early startup experience is where she picked up the operational and product instincts that would later shape Paladin.
It’s a path that doesn’t fit the usual “law school grad builds legal software” narrative you see a lot in this space. Sonday isn’t an attorney, and she’s said publicly that not coming from inside the legal profession gave her a clearer view of how confusing and inaccessible the system can feel to outsiders, including the lawyers trying to volunteer their time.
Building Paladin
Sonday co-founded Paladin alongside Felicity Conrad, a former litigator at Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom. The company’s mission is straightforward on paper: increase access to justice by making pro bono programs easier to run. In practice, that means replacing the manual process many legal teams still use, tracking volunteer hours and case matches through email and spreadsheets, with a platform built specifically for that workflow.
Paladin works with AmLaw 200 law firms, Fortune 500 in-house legal departments, bar associations, and more than 300 legal services organizations. According to reporting on the company, the platform has facilitated more than 55,000 pro bono connections to date. That’s not a small number for a category most people outside the legal industry don’t know exists.
What makes the pitch land with law firms and corporate legal teams isn’t charity math. Pro bono work is expensive to administer well, and a lot of firms struggle to track hours, match volunteers to appropriate cases, and report on impact in a way that satisfies both internal requirements and outside standards. Paladin’s software is built to solve that administrative bottleneck rather than the legal work itself.
Recognition in Legal Tech
Sonday’s work hasn’t gone unnoticed inside the legal industry. She’s been named an ILTA Influential Woman in LegalTech, an ABA Woman in Legal Tech to Watch, an ABA Journal Legal Rebel, and a FastCase50 honoree, recognitions that tend to go to people who’ve actually changed how a corner of the legal world operates, not just talked about it.
She also serves as Co-Chair of the Legal Services Corporation’s Emerging Leaders Council, and writes a column for the Thomson Reuters Institute called NextGen Justice Tech, where she covers how technology is reshaping access to legal help. That’s a fairly high-visibility perch in an industry that’s often slow to adopt new tools.
Beyond Paladin: LongJump
Sonday’s involvement in the startup world extends past her own company. She’s a founding partner of LongJump, a Chicago-based venture capital fund focused on backing early-stage founders. It’s a natural extension of someone who’s spent years building a company from the ground up in a sector that doesn’t get much venture attention, legal tech, and access to justice specifically, tends to attract far less capital than flashier categories like consumer apps or enterprise SaaS.
Why This Work Matters
The access to justice gap isn’t abstract. A large majority of low-income individuals’ civil legal needs in the U.S. go unaddressed, according to figures cited in coverage of Sonday’s work, meaning people facing eviction, wage theft, or family law issues frequently navigate the legal system with no professional help at all. Pro bono work from private attorneys is one of the main ways that gap gets narrowed, but only if the logistics of matching lawyers to cases and tracking the results actually function.
That’s the space Sonday has spent her career in, and it’s worth noting that this kind of infrastructure work rarely gets the attention that flashier legal tech, AI contract review tools, for instance, tends to attract. But without the matching and tracking layer Paladin provides, a lot of pro bono capacity simply goes unused because nobody has an efficient way to connect it to the people who need it.
