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| Katya Fisher |
Long before she founded Aracor AI, which uses generative artificial intelligence to speed up M&A deal management, contract review and the due diligence process, Fisher took her first big leap straight out of law school. Within a year of graduating, she became a solo practitioner instead of staying at an established law firm.
Fisher graduated from Yeshiva University's Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law in 2010 when the economy was still recovering from the Great Recession.
She recently told Law360 Pulse that after graduating, she had a job at a law firm before she was admitted to the bar, but she was only getting "lukewarm opportunities," so she decided to start her own solo practice.
"Every single time I'm scared of anything, I'm like, Madonna came to New York with $50 in her pocket," Fisher said. "The point is it all comes back to fearlessness ... You just have to do what it is that you want to do."
Fisher isn't the first person in her family to become a lawyer. Her grandfather, Mitchell Salem Fisher, was a rabbi-turned-attorney who specialized in marriage law and helped draft New York state's family law.
Her grandmother and Mitchell's wife, Esther Oshiver Fisher, was one of the first women to attend University of Pennsylvania Law School and became a marriage counselor.
Katya Fisher's mother, Regine Rayevsky Fisher, immigrated to the U.S. from Soviet Russia in 1979, and her father, Wesley Fisher, was born and raised in New York and became a professor at Columbia University.
Katya Fisher was born in Manhattan and her family moved to Princeton, New Jersey, when she was two, and then to Washington, D.C., where her father was founding director of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum.
Fisher moved back to New York City in 2001 to attend New York University for her bachelor of arts, and then law school.
Fisher said that law school was a "journey of self-discovery" for her. She went into law school with the ambition of becoming an impresario or music producer like Clive Davis and took many entertainment and media law classes. She also received a fellowship to study at the University of Oxford in its comparative media law and policy program.
During law school, Fisher worked at an entertainment law firm that represented Eric Clapton and Michael Bolton, as well as at Herrick Feinstein LLP, a law firm involved in Holocaust art restitution cases.
However, Fisher's interests started to shift after taking an introduction to federal income tax class.
"It changed my life because it opened up a side of my brain that I wasn't expecting," she said.
After that class, Fisher took corporate law, private equity and tax courses that she had originally been too intimidated to take.
"By the time I graduated law school, I had a very different vision for myself than I started out with," she said.
As a solo practitioner in New York City, Fisher started small by offering to do legal work for friends and family and building relationships with senior attorneys she interned or worked for in the past. They would provide her assistance at a discounted hourly rate. She handled a wide range of matters involving taxation, immigration and intellectual property.
Fisher said that she made her practice successful by serving as outside general counsel to big clients and telling them what they needed and whom they needed to hire.
"What I would do is I would go to these big clients and I would say, 'Listen, I'm not a specialist in anything. I don't have that training. I didn't go to a BigLaw firm after law school where they train you to do one narrow thing. I'm a generalist. I know how to do a ton of stuff … When you go to a big firm, they're putting eight partners on a call with you, and they're telling you that you need all of them, and then they're not telling you what you don't need, or what they don't offer that you might need to get somewhere else,'" Fisher said.
She added, "And I said, 'If you hire me, I'll bring your overall costs down, and I'll bring up your value. I'm not going to tell you not to hire these amazing lawyers. You need them. They can do things that I can't do, but I know when to use them and how to use them and how to get the best out of them, and you don't, but I'll help you with that.'"
Fisher made another big leap in her career after having her son and moving her family to Miami before the COVID-19 pandemic.
She accepted a partner position at Greenspoon Marder LLP in Miami leading its newly launched blockchain, digital assets and technology transactions practice group in 2019.
Fisher said that while she was at Greenspoon Marder, she used her expertise in data privacy to help the firm's chief technology officer and general counsel with getting the firm's International Standards Organization certification.
During that time, she secured a business meeting with prolific entrepreneur Serg Bell, and a few months later left Greenspoon Marder to work for Bell as a legal adviser.
Fisher said that when she first started working for Bell, she didn't have an official title, but eventually she became executive vice chair and chief legal officer of Bell's Constructor Group, a position she still holds today.
Fisher decided to found her own legal tech company after becoming frustrated with the amount of time her legal team would have to spend on due diligence for deals and how much it would cost to have a law firm do the work instead.
Fisher said that none of the existing products had the features she wanted, so she went to Bell about building a new product. He co-founded Aracor AI with her along with Gordon Caplan, a former co-chair of Willkie Farr & Gallagher LLP, in 2024.
"It was like, if not me, then who's going to do it?" she said.
Fisher later added, "I've accomplished enough. I don't have anything to prove to anybody anymore. Honestly, even with building this company, I'm doing it because I love it and because it's so much fun for me, but I have nothing to prove to anyone."
In February, Aracor AI raised $4.5 million in pre-seed funding to use for further product development, expanding market reach, scaling operations and bolstering platform security.
Fisher said her long-term goal for the company is to keep building a better product and become the Intuit of M&A tech software.
"I like to think that maybe I'll still be an impresario, just not quite in the way that I envisioned," she said.
--Additional reporting by Steven Lerner. Editing by Haylee Pearl.
Update: This story has been updated with additional details about Aracor AI.
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