Melissa Winblood
Founder, CEO & Principal Consultant — Counsel and Code, LLC
The Advisor Who Bridges Both Worlds
Melissa Winblood is an attorney* with 35 years of experience in criminal, civil, administrative, and appellate law. She is the founder of Counsel and Code, LLC, the advisory firm she built to bridge the gap between legal practice and artificial intelligence.
That gap is real, and it matters. There is no shortage of technology professionals who can implement AI tools. There is a significant shortage of people who can do it from inside a genuine understanding of how legal work happens: the workflows, the client relationships, the billing economics, and the professional responsibilities that make law firms fundamentally different from every other business. Melissa is that rare person.
After 35 years of practice, Melissa pursued and earned two of the most rigorous AI credentials available: the Harvard Data Science Initiative Agentic AI Intensive and the University of Texas McCombs Post-Graduate Program in AI and Machine Learning. During those programs, she did not study AI in the abstract. She designed, built, and deployed agentic AI workflows. The quality of her work was recognized publicly; her workflow design was featured at the Harvard HDSI Agentic AI Intensive closing celebration.
Before that, Melissa completed The University of Texas McCombs School of Business Post-Graduate Program in AI and Machine Learning for Business Applications, where she built working AI and machine learning solutions from the ground up, performing hands-on exploratory data analysis, building and training machine learning models, fine-tuning model performance, and deploying solutions to real-world business problems. That practical, builder-level experience is what distinguishes Counsel and Code's advisory work from firms that understand AI only in the abstract.
Melissa has also served as a contributing editor for The AI Innovator, where she writes for an audience of practitioners and technologists on the frontier of machine intelligence and its implications for legal practice.
*Counsel and Code, LLC provides business and strategic advisory services only and does not provide legal services, legal advice, or legal representation.
Agentic AI Intensive Program — Certificate Earned, December 2025
Workflow design featured at the program's closing celebration
Post-Graduate Program in AI and Machine Learning: Business Applications — Certificate Earned, October 2025 — GPA 4.19
35 Years of Practice — Criminal, Civil, Administrative & Appellate Law
The AI Innovator — theaiinnovator.com
Counsel and Code, LLC — Strategic AI Advisory for Law Firms
Featured at the Closing Celebration
The Harvard Data Science Initiative Agentic AI Intensive is not a certificate program that rewards completion. It rewards quality. At the program's closing celebration, Melissa's agentic AI workflow design was selected for recognition; this distinction reflects both the rigor of what she built and the practical applicability of the LexaWin™ Methodology to real legal practice challenges.
The clip at right is from that closing celebration, featuring commentary from Dirk Hofmann (DAIN Studios and Harvard Data Science Review), Stephanie Dick (Harvard Data Science Review), and Vinitra Swamy (Scholé).
Harvard Data Science Initiative — Agentic AI Intensive Closing Celebration
The LexaWin™ Methodology
Every Counsel and Code engagement involving agentic AI workflow design is built on the LexaWin Methodology, developed by Melissa Winblood and informed by 35 years of legal practice and Harvard-trained agentic AI design.
The methodology integrates two proprietary frameworks: the AI-AGENTIC™ Workflow Design Framework (for structured analysis and design of agentic AI solutions) and the AI-BUILD™ Architecture Framework (for implementation planning and deployment architecture). Together, these frameworks provide a disciplined, repeatable approach to understanding existing workflows, designing AI-enhanced solutions, mapping human-agent collaboration, and tracking measurable outcomes. All are calibrated to the specific operational reality of legal practice.
For law firms, this discipline matters. Agentic AI solutions that are not designed around how legal work actually happens (the matter economics, the supervision requirements, the client relationships) create new problems faster than they solve old ones. The LexaWin Methodology ensures that does not happen.
"Where agentic AI solutions require build-out, Counsel and Code designs the solution and refers implementation to experienced, trusted technical partners. You receive a clear, practice-informed design and the right people to build it."