About | Headnote | #1 Legal Payments Software

We're Headnote

We believe that law firms need technology made specifically for the exacting needs of the legal industry.

We're lawyers and technologists with first-hand experience dealing with the specific challenges of legal administration including chasing down clients for payment and outdated manual processes. Together we're building a platform to support a more efficient and effective legal industry starting with legal operations.

Legal operations often overlook accounts receivable. Automated AR and efficient post-invoicing processes is the key to law firm profitability and fiscal accountability, as well as client management and retention. If attorneys and administrators can focus on the practice of law rather than the tedium that comes with running a business, it results in better legal counsel for those in need. We're dedicated to making the tools that help attorneys work smarter and move our industry forward.

Our Leadership

Sarah Schaaf, Esq.
CEO & Co-Founder

Sarah Schaaf is an attorney, payments expert, and founder and CEO of Headnote. Sarah’s experience with the legal industry has spanned decades, starting with the work she performed at her family’s law firm. Sarah eventually followed in the family tradition and attended Loyola University Chicago School of Law, where she served as president of the student body and was a law review editor and author. Sarah then practiced as a litigator at firms in San Francisco including Hawkins Parnell Thackston & Young LLP prior to working an an attorney at Google. In 2014 she left Google to begin Headnote with the singular focus of changing the way law firms run the most important (and often most disliked) part of their legal operations – the AR department. She is an active member of several legal tech and Fintech groups in Silicon Valley including NFX Guild, Commerce Innovated and Founders for Change. Sarah is a regular podcast guest and conference speaker, and the co-founder of the entrepreneurial group Silicon Valley Legal Tech. Sarah lives in Marin County with her family and loves to spend her weekends in Sonoma hiking, eating and drinking the best pinot noir in the entire world.

Sarah Schaaf Thornton Schaaf
Head of Product & Co-Founder

Thornton is a veteran founder and member of the tech community in San Francisco and Silicon Valley. Prior to working in tech, Thornton grew up in a family of attorneys, spending many hours working at his family’s law firms. Although he considered becoming an attorney, Thornton ultimately pursued business instead, earning his bachelor’s degree in finance and real estate at DePaul University. Prior to launching Headnote, Thornton worked as a senior manager of business development at InMobi and a senior sales executive at Quantcast. He was also the founder of a commodities trading company and an environmental asset consulting company. Thornton currently runs Headnote's Product and Customer Success teams and has an immense passion for working with attorneys, incorporating their feedback into Headnote’s core product offering. His mission is to use technology and automation to help attorneys take back their non-billable time so they can do what they do best – practice law. Thornton loves spending his weekends riding his bike, watching Notre Dame football (Go Irish!) and enjoying the Bay Area with his young family.

Sarah Schaaf Matt Crampton
CTO & Co-Founder

Matt Crampton has served as a software engineer, engineering manager, technical advisor and CTO for the last 19 years, focused on building SaaS companies selling to SMB and enterprise customers. Matt has served as technical co-founder for multiple startups including Gigwalk and API Canary, raising investments from August Capital, NGP, Greylock, Uncork Capital, Precursor Ventures and Harrison Metal. In addition, Matt has lead engineering organizations for Yahoo, Gap.com and AOL. Matt has been featured on CNN, TechCrunch, Fortune, Salon, Huffington Post, CBS and Entrepreneur Magazine. Matt lives in the East Bay of the San Francisco Bay Area and spends many sleepless (but enjoyable) nights with his wife and newborn son.

Sarah Schaaf Guy Barbaro
Head of Financial Operations

Guy is a hands-on financial consultant who specializes in helping early stage companies build their finance and accounting systems from the ground up. He brings experience from in-house roles at several start-ups, including Current TV and Listen.com, and has also played key roles in S-1 filings for one IPO and two acquisitions. Guy has seen many of his clients become acquisition targets or grow into larger successful operations. He oversees all of Headnote's financial operations. After graduating from the University of Washington, Guy worked as an auditor for Deloitte + Touche, after which he spent a decade working in various management positions at a large consumer bank. Guy lives in San Francisco and enjoys weekends spent with his cats or vacationing in Santa Barbara.

Board Members & Advisors

Stephanie Palmeri, a partner with Uncork Capital, has led over 25 investments at Uncork in the consumer, marketplaces, SaaS, education technology, health and hardware sectors. She previously served on the boards of Chariot (acquired by Ford), Niche (acquired by Twitter), and Spoon University (acquired by Scripps Networks Interactive), and spent a decade working in New York City in roles that spanned technology, marketing and startups. Stephanie holds an MBA from Columbia Business School and graduated magna cum laude from Villanova University with joint BS degrees in marketing and management information systems.

A four-time serial entrepreneur, James Currier is one of Silicon Valley’s foremost experts in growth and network effects and a pioneer of user-generated models, viral marketing, a/b testing, crowdsourcing and myriad other growth techniques now followed by nearly all technology companies. James co-founded and served as CEO of one of the Internet’s first successful user-generated companies, Tickle, which grew to become the 18th largest website in the world with over 150 million registered users. He also co-founded Wonderhill, IronPearl and Jiff. James earned an MBA at Harvard Business School and a BA in political economics at Princeton.

Michael Glaser is a leading emerging companies attorney and the co-chair of the Perkins Coie corporate practice who helped earn Perkins Coie recognition as U.S. News & World Reports’ “Firm of the Year for Venture Capital Law” in 2012 and 2013. He has led clients in the consumer e-commerce, interactive entertainment, digital media, consumer products, sharing economy, cloud services and premise-based software sectors through hundreds of venture capital transactions, with valuations ranging from less than $10 million to more than $2 billion. He holds a JD from New York University School of Law and earned a BS, magna cum laude, from State University of New York at Albany.

Jonathan Lowenhar is founder and managing partner of ETW Advisors, a firm of expert early stage operators who advise the next generation of startups to launch, grow and reach scale. During his 20-year career, he has successfully built a $1B business segment for a large public company, guided the turnaround of a distressed $100M+ revenue business, launched and sold a venture-backed startup and led the rise of one of the world’s fastest growing B2B SaaS businesses. Jonathan is currently advisor to inDinero, Adverator, indus.ai and Tipalti, among many other companies, and serves on the board of Teampay. He holds MBA degrees from Columbia Business School at Columbia University and Walter A. Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley, and earned a BS in hotel administration from Cornell University.