Ian R. Cohen

Ian R. Cohen is the founder and principal of IRC Legal, where he provides Strategic Counsel, Deal Architecture, and Fractional General Counsel services to scaling companies.

With more than 17 years of legal experience, Ian brings a perspective that few advisors can match. He spent nearly a decade in BigLaw in New York City at Schulte, Roth & Zabel and BakerHostetler, advising on high-stakes M&A and securities matters, before serving as full-time General Counsel for two high-growth tech companies. This dual experience gives clients something rare: the technical rigor of elite outside counsel and the operational judgment of an executive who has operated inside the business.

Ian has guided companies through every major financial milestone: Seed through Series C financings, SPAC and other public market transactions, tender offers, and complex mergers and acquisitions, including two billion-dollar PE-backed exits. His role extends beyond transactions; he embeds within organizations to ensure legal strategy moves at the speed of growth, aligning closely with business priorities and commercial goals.

His core value to clients is clarity. He focuses teams on what materially matters, eliminating friction between legal, operations, and revenue functions and building scalable processes that enable confident execution.

Representative Transactions

• $1 billion sale of PE-backed telecom company
• $1 billion sale of PE-backed government contracting business
• $10 million to $50 million seed financing rounds
• Series A, B and C financing rounds ($50 million to $300 million)
• Going public transactions, including SPAC transactions
• SAFE note financing rounds
• Convertible note financing rounds
• Tender offers
• Minority and majority investments
• Hundreds of commercial agreements (tech, SaaS, ecommerce, retail, logistics, leases, licenses, B2B, B2C)
• Joint ventures, partnerships and fund formation
• Entity formations
• Dispute resolution

Education

Hofstra University - School of Law, JD

University of Maryland - College Park, BA