Pantea Farhi Stevenson
Founding Partner
Pantea is an award-winning attorney with 18 years of experience spanning Big Law to law firm partner to Deputy General Counsel at one of DC’s only tech unicorns to General Counsel at a tech company. Ultimately, Pantea returned to her entrepreneurial roots to build a boutique firm grounded in her values, insights, and best practices: one that merges excellence with the agility, creativity and pragmatism that can only come from someone who’s built organizations from inside and out and sat on both sides of the table.
She has distilled that journey into Farhi Law, bringing her expertise to a law firm that is designed to guide businesses through their most important transactions and decisions.
Pantea began her career in mergers and acquisitions (M&A) at Jones Day in New York, advising public and private boards and closing high-stakes transactions. At Morgan Lewis, she represented science, pharmaceutical, and tech companies in partnerships, IP licensing, co-development, and fundraising deals.
She later built her own practice, which was acquired by Bean Kinney & Korman, where she became a partner focused on corporate transactions and M&A. From there, she joined one of her clients as its first General Counsel and COO, building its legal, operations and controls functions.
At Cvent, one of the region’s largest tech companies, Pantea led multi-million dollar SaaS negotiations against Fortune 500 companies, provided legal support for the company’s IPO, oversaw corporate and litigation matters.
Pantea then joined Upside as Chief Legal Commercial Officer and later Chief Legal Officer for Partnerships and Product. There, she led some of the largest deals in the company’s history–with deals regularly valued in millions–negotiated fundraising deals worth $100M+, designed enterprise-wide regulatory frameworks (including privacy, AML, and AI governance), and built scalable legal infrastructure–CLM system, AI-enabled workflows, and standardized agreement templates–that dramatically expanded the legal team’s impact.
Pantea uses her expertise to provide strategic legal advice and help companies grow and close deals. She has advised companies through their most important inflection points, built legal departments from the ground up, drove strategic initiatives and negotiated deals that define companies. All while helping companies plan and prepare for their goals.
Pantea has also served on nonprofit boards, taught negotiations and business law, and led cross-functional teams supporting companies from startup through IPO and beyond.
