Katherine Minarik

Katherine Minarik is Vice President of Legal and Deputy General Counsel of Coinbase, the world’s leading digital currency company. At Coinbase, Katherine leads the team responsible for all litigation and disputes, including the company’s most sensitive matters. Katherine is also co-founder and co-host of the legal podcast Heels of Justice, which tells the story of trailblazing women lawyers.

Katherine came to Coinbase from Dyson where she was General Counsel for Dyson Americas. Katherine led the Dyson legal function for the western hemisphere and sat on the Dyson Americas leadership team. Before Dyson, Katherine was the Chief Administrative Officer and Global General Counsel at cleverbridge, one the world’s leading ecommerce solutions companies. Katherine was the first female executive in cleverbridge’s history, and she managed the legal and compliance functions in addition to human resources and information security. Katherine was also previously an equity partner and trial lawyer at Bartlit Beck, where she represented Fortune 500 companies and startups on their most pressing legal matters and successfully resolved multiple billion-dollar-plus disputes.

Katherine serves on the board of directors of ChIPs, a global network for women lawyers in tech, and co-created the ChIPs Next Gen summit, now in its fourth year, for rising stars in the profession. Katherine is a past-President of the Coalition for Women’s Initiatives in Law, where she led the expansion of the Coalition to become a national organization. Katherine was one of the lead lawyers who served at O’Hare International Airport during the heat of the 2017 travel bans. Katherine is also the co-founder of the first law school clinic dedicated to reproductive rights law, the Penn Law Reproductive Justice Clinic.

Katherine is an elected member of the American Law Institute and a Fellow of the American Bar Association. In 2018, Katherine received the Ruth Goldman Award from the American Constitution Society for her work on behalf of women in the legal profession and the advancement of women’s issues through the law.

Katherine was also named a Best Lawyers’ Women of Influence and one of Crain’s Most Influential Women Lawyers in Chicago in 2017, one of the Women’s Bar Association of Illinois’s Top Women Lawyers in Leadership in 2016, and one of the Law Bulletin’s “40 Under 40” Illinois attorneys in 2014. Katherine is a founding member of the US Soccer Development Council, a former McKinsey consultant and former law clerk for the Honorable Diane P. Wood on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit.

Katherine and her husband Rob have a seven-year-old daughter, Lois, and a slightly older dog, Dunkel.