Gregory Pyper – BambooHR

In a Brigham Young University lecture hall, a theater student who could recite Shakespeare more comfortably than he could balance an equation sat waiting to hear from a weekly lecture from practicing attorneys. He expected talk of courtrooms and closing arguments, the kind of legal drama that first drew him toward the profession. Instead, one speaker described something entirely different: a single company, a single client, a seat at the table where business decisions actually got made. Greg Pyper, now associate general counsel at BambooHR, still points to that afternoon as the moment his entire career direction changed.

Gregory Pyper | BambooHR | Director, Associate General Counsel

Pyper never gravitated toward math or science. Language, history, and storytelling came more easily, and years spent in theater sharpened a comfort with communication and presentation that would later prove essential in conference rooms rather than on stage. Attorneys he met through church and community left an impression, too, blending analytical rigor with problem-solving in a way he admired. Law school briefly nudged him toward litigation, drawn by its performative energy, but the courtroom never became the destination he expected.

What resonated was something broader: the philosophical and practical questions of how law shapes organizations and the people within them. Raised around entrepreneurship, with a father who spent his career in business coaching, Pyper had already absorbed a business-first instinct long before he understood it as one. He grew up around entrepreneurs and business owners, watching companies get built from the ground up, and that early exposure shaped how he thought about law long before he ever set foot in a classroom. That lecture-hall moment simply gave the instinct a name. In-house practice offered the chance to embed within a single organization, to understand a business from the inside rather than serve it from the outside, and to build a career without sacrificing evenings and weekends to a law firm’s billable clock. He earned his law degree at BYU Law School, then built early experience in banking compliance at Goldman Sachs before moving in-house at fintech company MoneyLion, steadily accumulating the generalist skill set that would soon matter more than he realized.

An unexpected call

Pyper wasn’t job hunting when BambooHR came calling. His brother had already worked there for years, and a talent acquisition partner recognized his name on LinkedIn and made the connection. What began as a casual conversation evolved into something bigger: BambooHR, founded in Draper, Utah, in 2008 by Ben Peterson and Ryan Sanders, was building a cloud-based human resources platform for small and midsize businesses and needed its very first in-house attorney. The company had spent a decade operating without one.

“I joke that I had no business getting this job — I was just a few years out of law school,” Pyper says. “At worst, I’d have the experience and the story to tell.”

He met with talent leaders, the CFO, and the company’s founders throughout the process, and something about the culture stood out immediately. BambooHR had already built a reputation as an award-winning place to work, founded on the idea of creating an organization that prioritizes its mission, values, and culture, and builds an experience for its employees and customers.

“I knew I was going to a place where people would support me, doing it with good people I could work with,” he says.

Joining in January 2019, Pyper became a one-person legal department, absorbing nearly every legal function a growing SaaS company generates: commercial contracts, intellectual property, employment law, corporate governance, and privacy — a discipline he had no prior background in but quickly mastered out of necessity. That generalist stretch, uncomfortable as it sometimes was, became the foundation for everything that followed.

Building something from nothing

By 2022, growth had outpaced what one attorney could manage alone, and Pyper was tasked with designing BambooHR’s future legal team, working alongside an incoming CFO who brought his own legal background from Adobe. He hired a legal operations paralegal, commercial counsel, and a dedicated privacy and data security attorney, structuring the group around where the business was headed rather than where it had been. The team has since helped onboard BambooHR’s first Chief Legal Officer, a transition Pyper welcomed as an opportunity to keep learning rather than a threat to his own standing.

Today, he reports to the CLO while managing two attorneys and a paralegal himself—the overall legal department is roughly quadruple the size it was when he made his three hires. His responsibilities have shifted accordingly: he now leads intellectual property strategy, including trademark filings and patent troll defense; commercial contracting and product counseling on compliance and regulatory matters. He also remains the organization’s go-to resource for issues that don’t fit neatly under anyone else’s job description, from litigation coordination to employment questions.

Artificial intelligence, in particular, has become unavoidable. Pyper has started using it to help redline contracts, even as he coaches a recent hire — new to the legal profession and already experimenting with AI in her prior role — to balance efficiency against the fundamentals a young lawyer still needs to learn firsthand.

“AI is part of what you have to figure out for your job now,” he says.

A culture measured in more than growth

Ask Pyper what he’s proudest of, and the answer isn’t a contract or a courtroom win. It’s retention. BambooHR’s legal team has posted a consistently positive employee Net Promoter Score, the kind of metric companies typically reserve for customer satisfaction, turned inward to measure whether employees would recommend working there.

“I want to be the type of person people want to work for and work with,” Pyper says.

That philosophy mirrors the company he serves. BambooHR’s founders built the business around a mission to set people free to do great work, deliberately avoiding the venture-backed, growth-at-all-costs playbook common across the software industry. Nearly two decades later, the company is a leader in the HCM space, a fact Pyper sees as proof that the original vision has held up.

He’s also become something of an unofficial mentor to BYU law students weighing their own paths, many of whom feel boxed into the traditional firm-to-partner track.

“My experience shows that you can take a different route and still have a successful career as a lawyer,” he says.

Pyper’s own résumé backs that up: a theater degree, a detour through banking compliance, and a decision to bet on an unproven in-house role at a company still building its legal function. What began as a single hire tasked with keeping BambooHR out of legal trouble has grown into a 12-person department shaping product strategy, IP protection, and contracting models built to scale with thousands of customers.

Through it all, Pyper has kept the same instinct he first noticed in that BYU lecture hall — that you can build a great career and do interesting work not just at a law firm or in the courtroom but inside a business helping it grow.