Faculty Profile: Paul Ney Jr

Mr. Paul Ney is Momentus Inc.’s Chief Legal Officer and Corporate Secretary. Momentus is a U.S. commercial space company that offers satellite buses, transportation, and other in space infrastructure services. Mr. Ney has nearly four decades of public service and private law practice experience. Most recently, he was presidentially appointed and confirmed by the U.S. Senate to serve as the General Counsel of the Department of Defense. In this position, he was the Department’s chief legal officer leading a team of over 12,000 lawyers that served the Department’s more than 2.8 million military and civilian personnel, and he served as the Designated Agency Ethics Official overseeing the Department’s Standards of Conduct Office. During his tenure in the Department of Defense, the U.S. Space Force and the U.S. Space Command were established. In earlier government roles, Mr. Ney was the Principal Deputy and the acting General Counsel of the United States Department of the Navy and Chief Deputy Attorney General for the State of Tennessee. He also served as Director of the Nashville Davidson County Mayor’s Office of Economic and Community Development. Before his most recent service in the Pentagon, Mr. Ney was a partner in the law firms Trauger, Ney & Tuke, and Patterson Intellectual Property Law, P.C. He is a registered patent attorney and has more than three decades of experience litigating business, intellectual property, and commercial matters.