About Northstar
Legal

Seasoned attorneys with deep experience at top law firms and leading technology companies.

Northstar Legal provides practical, business-minded legal counsel to founders and product teams building in fintech, crypto, and emerging technology. Our attorneys bring experience from top law firms and leading technology companies, combining legal rigor with an understanding of how products are built and businesses scale.

The People

Our Team

Seasoned attorneys with deep experience at top law firms and leading technology companies.

Josh Downer

Josh Downer

Founder, Managing Partner

Josh has a decade of experience in the law, where he has advised some of the world's most prominent Wall Street banks, fintechs, and crypto companies. After completing a Federal District Court clerkship, Josh started law practice in the Financial Institution's Group at Sullivan & Cromwell LLP, where he advised traditional and non-traditional financial institutions on a wide variety of transactional, regulatory and enforcement matters. Josh moved to the industry-leading Fintech group at Paul Hastings before transitioning in-house to the role of Senior Product Counsel at Ripple Labs.

At Ripple, Josh led the global effort to establish Ripple's cross-border crypto-payments system on sound legal and regulatory footing, including with respect to AML and sanctions, prudential regulation, and licensing and supervision. Josh developed and managed relationships with more than a dozen of the world's most sophisticated financial services firms in jurisdictions at the forefront of crypto regulation, including in the United States, UK, Japan, Singapore, UAE, Australia, Canada, Brazil, Mexico, and Thailand.

Josh left Ripple to serve as General Counsel to a licensed money transmitter serving crypto companies. Since founding Northstar Legal, LLC in early 2023, Josh has served as fractional General Counsel to L1 core developers, defi projects, and a global Web3 gaming company.

Select general counsel representations include:

  • L1 blockchain foundation with 16B in tokenized real-world assets
  • Regulated-to-defi securities infrastructure provider pioneering peer-to-peer (p2p) transactions in securities
  • Decentralized (i.e., p2p) applications with hundreds of millions in monthly volume and growing, powering deposits from the broad universe of alt and meme coins into stablecoins on leading consumer dApps
  • Cryptographically unprecedented zero knowledge proof infrastructure, proof-of-work L1 with native zk proving by lightweight consumer devices

Education

  • Vanderbilt University Law School, J.D. 2013 (Order of the Coif)
  • London School of Economics, Master of Science in International Political Economy, 2010 (with Merit)
  • Harvard University, A.B. in Government, 2009

Bar Admissions

New York

Roza Nader

Roza Nader

Partner

Roza brings a distinctive combination of corporate, tax, and regulatory experience to her work with emerging tech companies. She began her career in tax at Deloitte and KPMG, developing foundational expertise in tax planning and mergers and acquisitions. She earned her J.D. at UC Hastings (UC Law SF) and a Tax LL.M. at Georgetown University Law Center.

Roza joined Goodwin Procter LLP as a Corporate Associate, where she advised tech companies on corporate transactions, venture financings, capital markets, and M&A matters. She then moved in-house to Kraken, one of the world's largest cryptocurrency exchanges, where she served as Senior Counsel and led strategic transactions while advising on corporate governance, product development, and regulatory matters. She then served as Head of Legal at Nexus, a cutting-edge layer-one protocol for the AI generation, launching a decentralized perpetuals trading platform.

At Northstar Legal, Roza serves as General Counsel to leading crypto companies pioneering decentralized finance. She is fluent in Spanish and Farsi.

Education

  • Georgetown University Law Center, LL.M. in Taxation, 2016
  • UC Hastings (UC Law SF), J.D. 2015
  • University of Southern California, B.S. in Business Administration and B.A. in Political Science

Bar Admissions

California

Jenn Hartzler

Jenn Hartzler

Of Counsel

Jenn helps ambitious founders and teams realize their visions by drawing on her 15+ years experience working across industries and jurisdictions in start-ups, scale-ups and Biglaw. She began her career practicing international arbitration at Herbert Smith in London, working with clients spanning Europe, the Middle East, Africa, Asia and the Americas, in various industries and sectors navigate their most complex and big-ticket disputes. Then Uber happened: a secondment to Uber showed her what it felt like to build something instead of arbitrate about it later. She was hooked.

Since then, Jenn has spent her career in fast-paced, emerging tech companies leading, building and scaling in-house legal functions, including as Head of Legal at AlphaSights, and most recently as General Counsel/Company Secretary at Candy Digital, an institutional-grade NFT digital collectibles company and marketplace.

Jenn's practice focuses on various aspects of the digital assets ecosystem (including NFTs, blockchain and token launches, DAO and other decentralized governance structures, stablecoins, real-world asset tokenization, and the convergence of traditional finance and DeFi), while at the same time providing the soup-to-nuts support an early-stage company requires.

Education

  • University of Florida, J.D. 2010
  • Queen Mary University of London, 2009-2010 International Exchange Programme
  • University of Central Florida, Master of Nonprofit Management, 2007 (in conjunction with the Florida Gubernatorial Fellows Program)
  • University of Central Florida, B.S.B.A. in Economics, 2006

Bar Admissions

New York

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