Hayley Nivelle wearing a black suit.
 

NEW York

Active member in good standing of the NY Bar since 2009.

Education

  • University of Pennsylvania Law School, J.D.; Research Editor, Journal of International Law

  • University of Pennsylvania, The Wharton School: Certificate in Business & Public Policy

  • Kansas State University, M.S. Finance, Honors Program

Hayley Nivelle, Esq.

Principal & Founder

Hayley has been practicing business and commercial law in New York City for over ten years and was trained by the best of the best. Following law school, Hayley joined Simpson Thacher & Bartlett LLP (a top 10 national law firm) where she negotiated multi-million dollar deals for banking and private equity clients. She loved learning about her clients’ businesses and wanted the feeling of truly digging into a client’s business vs executing front page deals every few weeks.  After five years she decided to leave Big Law and move to the company side of things. Hayley joined ION Media Networks, as their Associate General Counsel where she quickly saw that the lines between legal and business decisions were often blurred and that to be an effective company lawyer you need to think more like the company and less like a lawyer. 

Most recently, Hayley served as the Chief Corporate & Commercial Counsel at Ubiquiti Inc. (NYSE: UI), a multi-billion dollar, publicly-traded technology company with a startup mindset--in the best way possible. No day was the same and things moved fast. Whether it was launching new products, establishing international offices, negotiating key technology licensing or manufacturing agreements, managing company litigation or corporate governance issues, Hayley had to think quickly, collaboratively and thoughtfully- every day.

But then the startup bug bit her. She left to launch a group communication app aimed at disrupting Facebook groups. She knows the startup grind. Being a founder is all consuming, exciting, exhausting and not nearly as glamorous as it appears to the outside world. All this to say she realized after a year that she wasn’t going to shake the startup bug, but that her company was likely not going to disrupt Facebook, so she decided to step away and slow it down. Hayley realized that she could take her experience as a lawyer and former founder to be an even better lawyer to her clients. And Nivelle Law was born.

There are a lot of legal issues that can be prevented up front—if you do things right from the beginning. No one wants to spend the time or money dealing with legal issues after the fact—and that’s why a good company lawyer is paramount to any growth story.