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Tom McCabe has run startups, steered legal at XM SatelliteRadio through its merger with Sirius, helped scale Orbital ATK from $1B to $9B, and been with several great companies in his long and storied career. Now he serves as both General Counsel and COO at Istari Digital. In this conversation with Matt Thrasher, Catherine Parnell, and Sean, Tom unpacks what it means to hold two demandingroles at once, why being a business-forward lawyer requires real empathy for the CEO, and his hard-won management lesson: focus on the 80% people do well and let that ignite the rest. The discussion also covers M&A from bothsides of the table, why every lawyer should learn accounting, how AI is reshaping legal workflows, and why the defense tech resurgence is here to stay.

Chase Johnson, formerly Principal Deputy General Counsel atAnduril and now a founding member at Prometheus, sits down with host Sean Zehtab and guest host Catharine Parnell to trace his career path from the Marines, to Covington & Burling, and on to the cutting edge of defense tech.   Chase unpacks what it really takes to practice law inside ahyper-growth startup: unlearning law firm perfectionism in favor of a bias for action, surviving task-switching across diverse legal practice areas such as IP, procurement, and proposals, and knowing when to ask the question nobody else will. He shares how he built Anduril's legal department from a handful of generalists to a 130+ person team, how hiring priorities shift as a company scales, and why foundersshould bring on a strategic-thinking general counsel far earlier than they think. The conversation also covers the culture challenge ofscaling without losing scrappiness, when to kill a meeting forever, why leaders owe their teams explanations, not just decisions, and what it takes for active-duty JAG officers to make the leap into industry.

Catharine Parnell, a former Army JAG and DoJ Civil Division trial attorney, describes moving into in-house work after business school when a veteran contact connected her with Skyloom Global, a free-space optics “space lasers” company later acquired by IonQ. She discusses how JAG and DoJ work prepared her to rapidly learn new domains, manage stakeholders, and apply frameworks like Chesterton’s Fence, while emphasizing curiosity, note-taking, pattern recognition, and digging for hidden risks as a startup GC. Parnell highlights the scale of prioritization as a solo legal function, the need for systems and time visibility, and limitations on AI use gov cloud environments alongside risks like export-control violations and shadow AI. Key demanding areas include export controls, government contracting, and securities/financing. She advises startups to be organized for diligence, and aspiring GCs to learn broad legal topics plus finance, operations, and industry vocabulary, maintain relationships, and embrace nonlinear career paths.

Rarely does someone bridge the worlds of national security, policy, and the defense industry with such clarity as Matt Thrasher does. After a career as an officer in the Navy, a JAG attorney, and at the Department of Defense Office of General Counsel, Thrasher recently landed at Fluet law firm, bringing hard-won perspective to one of the most exciting times in the defense industry. He also served as deputy legal advisor at the National Security Council during an administration transition, where he watched national security priorities shift in real time. Thrasher brings those insights to this conversation.

Guest is Sarah Needham, Visiting Associate Professor & Defense Industry Initiative Fellow, GW Law. Discussion includes compliance trends and issues affecting defense tech companies. The views expressed by the participants are personal and do not represent the views of their employers or the Defense Tech Legal Network.