Agiloft announced that Kristin Knox Esche has joined the company as General Counsel, effective June 22, 2026.
Esche brings more than 20 years of experience building legal functions inside engineering-driven and highly regulated organizations. She most recently served as Senior Vice President and Deputy General Counsel at Mitsubishi HC Capital America.
At Mitsubishi HC Capital America, Esche helped modernize and centralize the legal function following a period of rapid inorganic growth. She also implemented the company’s first eBilling and matter management system.
Esche also laid the foundation to integrate contract lifecycle management directly into the company’s financial origination system and unify template management processes that had previously spanned multiple systems and repositories.
Before Mitsubishi HC Capital America, Esche spent more than a decade at Deere & Company. She initially supported Crop Harvesting Engineering and later worked in the Office of the Corporate Secretary on SEC reporting, corporate governance, and capital markets transactions.
She also served as Associate Chief Counsel for Product & Innovation at John Deere Financial. In that role, she led the legal and compliance workstream for the company’s shift to agile product development and helped seed Deere’s AI governance working group following the release of ChatGPT.
Agiloft said Esche’s experience as a legal leader and former customer of contract management technology will help shape the company’s internal legal function and inform how it builds products for customers.
Esche holds a J.D. from UC Law San Francisco, formerly known as Hastings College of the Law; an M.A. in Women’s Studies from The Ohio State University; and a B.A. in Literature from the University of California, San Diego.
She also serves on the Iowa Supreme Court Access to Justice Commission and has a long-standing commitment to pro bono legal work.
KEY QUOTES:
“Kristin has sat on the other side of the table from us as the legal leader actually living with the contracting problems we build software to solve. She has run legal operations inside companies going through real change: mergers, agile transformations, the early days of generative AI inside a legal department. That’s exactly the perspective we want shaping our own legal function and informing how we build for customers like her.”
Eric Laughlin, Chief Executive Officer of Agiloft
“I’ve spent my career translating complexity into clarity, whether that meant standing on a factory floor with engineers or designing the operating model for a unified legal department after periods of rapid inorganic growth. What drew me to Agiloft is that every part of that experience finally points the same direction. I have been the customer this company builds for, and I am looking forward to helping shape what comes next, both inside Agiloft and for its customers.”
Kristin Knox Esche
