Last week’s hearing on a preliminary injunction in the legal case between Matt Mullenweg/Automattic and WP Engine featured an Automattic lawyer we hadn’t heard mentioned before. That would be their General Counsel, Jordan Hinkes. That role has been their second to the top lawyer. Bloomberg Law reported on Friday that he was newly on the job. His LinkedIn profile shows him having taken the job in October:

From that you can see that he was the acting General Counsel beginning in April. His move to that role coincided with a couple of other changes in the legal team. Those changes may have related to what has been going on recently.

TechCrunch’s Ivan Mehta reported that the Chief Legal Officer, the top lawyer, at Automattic, Paul Sieminski, had published a post on an internal blog in January laying out Automattic gaining more control of the WordPress trademark. As described by Ivan, that ‘outlined a plan for how Automattic would approach this strategy, through direct negotiations with companies and via legal action from “nice and not nice lawyers and trademark enforcers.”‘ That appears to be connected to what WP Engine and Automattic were really discussing before Matt Mullenweg engaged in what appears to be an extortion attempt against WP Engine.

Paul Sieminski then left Automattic in April and became the Chief Legal Office of Liquid AI. It is certainly possible that his leaving was unrelated, but it would be surprising that it was related to what was going on. Related reasons could be because Matt Mullenweg was unhappy that Automattic hadn’t properly defending the WordPress trademark in the past, leaving their options limited, or that he was unhappy to be told that their control of the trademark was limited.

In April, the previous General Counsel had moved up to the Chief Legal Officer role. The person in that role, Holly Hogan, hasn’t been heard of since the situation between Matt Mullenweg and WP Engine became public. Her only appearance was to be the addressee for WP Engine’s cease and desist letter. We did hear from an associate general counsel for Automattic, though, one who appeared to completely be speaking on things he didn’t understand at all.

While the previous Chief Legal Officer was suggesting having lawyers play a central role with Automattic’s action over the WordPress trademark, they were notably absent from meetings between WP Engine and Automattic leading up to the apparent extortion campaign. Matt Mullenweg’s actions since that became public have repeatedly suggested he isn’t listening to his lawyers. For example, on October 20 he said he would top talking about the legal case until a ruling on the preliminary injunction. That didn’t hold true. Four days later he was announced to be speaking at TechCrunch Disrupt. On October 30, he spoke at that. In that interview, he directly contradicted his lawyers’ legal filings made the same day. On November 4, WP Engine’s lawyers noted the contradictions at the beginning of a legal filing about the preliminarily injunction. The judge still hasn’t ruled on the preliminary injunction.

Some of that might explain why Holly Hogan’s LinkedIn profile shows that she left Automattic in October:

We didn’t find any coverage of that and therefore an explanation for their leaving, but unlike the previous Chief Legal Officer, their LinkedIn profile doesn’t mention a new employer.

We couldn’t find any information on if a replacement for the second Chief Legal Officer to leave this year has happened yet. (There isn’t a job opening for that listed on Automattic’s website.) If you have any information on this, leave a comment or send us a tip.

Paul Sieminski had been with Automattic since 2012 and Holly Hogan had been with them since 2016.  Jordan Hinkes only joined the company last year, after working at Twitter.