Karen is a leading voice on practical governance strategies for AI and frontier technologies. She brings over three decades of experience advising on complex global business and legal issues and now leads an innovative, advisory group that supports leaders in business and government on workable governance practices for both novel and everyday uses of advanced technologies. Her experience spans industries and functions and includes B2B and B2C applications, digital health, strategic and competitive planning, M&A, ESG and crisis management. She is a globally recognized leader in corporate antitrust matters, successfully guiding hundreds of transactions through complex regulatory challenges and enterprise- critical government investigations to completion.
CEO and Founder of The Cantellus Group (www.cantellusgroup.com), an advisory group for Boards, executives and agency heads who are responsible for the oversight of applied AI and other frontier technologies. The former managing partner of Latham & Watkins, LLP San Francisco office, she led the firm’s partnership with the World Economic Forum (WEF). Today, she sits on the WEF Global AI Council, the Experts Group and The Cantellus Group is a WEF Global Innovator. Karen is on the Fast Company Impact Council and was named by the Financial Times as a Top Ten Innovative Lawyer (2019), by the California Daily Journal as a Top AI Attorney in California (2019) and one of the100 Brilliant Women in AI Ethics (2020). She writes and speaks on AI and how companies can render broad technology policy (and coming regulations) into workable process that supports their innovation and commercial objectives. Her work appears in the WEF Agenda, MIT/Sloan Management Review, the ABA publications, CogX and elsewhere.
Outside General Counsel and Secretary to the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society, Inc. (HIMSS), the leading global digital health society. Her experience includes the U.S. Department of Justice and SEC.
She sits on the boards of Krunam, LLC (Chairman), Legal Momentum (Audit and NomGov), The American AI Forum (all committees) and Not for Sale (all committees). She sits on the IEEE/SSIT Standards andLaws Committees. She graduated from Wellesley College, UC Berkeley School of Law and holds a Certificate from MIT Sloan/CSAIL on Artificial Intelligence: Implications for Business Strategy.
Karen lives in San Francisco and is active in organizations dedicated to the development and advancement of women and people of color, the abolition of human trafficking, and broader education around the impact of technology on their everyday and professional lives.