Legal Leaders to Watch: Spring 2026 (Founding Cohort)
What does it mean to be a leader worth watching in 2026?
Not the household name. Not the public-figure profile. The leader whose work is shaping their organization, their function, or their adjacent ecosystem in ways that aren't yet fully visible — but are starting to compound.
Counsel Collective exists to surface those leaders. The platform launched on a thesis: the most consequential legal and operating work happening right now is being done by counsel whose recognition hasn't caught up to their contribution. Our editorial mission is to close that gap — to find the operators, the function-builders, the ecosystem amplifiers, and to tell their stories before the wider market catches on.
The founding cohort assembled in this first Leaders to Watch edition is exactly that. A General Counsel building a legal function from a blank page mid-PE transformation. A Chief Legal Officer shaping how an entire emerging industry navigates the gap between what's possible and what's permitted. A founder converting twenty-plus years of in-house experience into the kind of fractional advisory architecture mid-market companies actually need. An Associate General Counsel who has spent five years quietly running the most consistent legal-recognition platform on LinkedIn while doing the work that earns her own.
Ten leaders. Different operating contexts. Different career arcs. What links them is the substance of the work itself — and the trajectory underneath it.
Jason Fiorillo
Jason Fiorillo's tenure as Chief Legal Officer at Boston Dynamics has spanned the company's transformation from singular humanoid-robotics innovator to one player in a category that now spawns three or four new entrants every year. The legal work has evolved with it: protocols for placing autonomous robots into workspaces alongside human workers, navigating regulatory frameworks the law itself hasn't fully built, and forecasting risk in a field where the technology routinely outruns the case law. He represents a particular kind of in-house leadership — counsel whose work shapes how an emerging industry navigates the gap between what's possible and what's permitted.
Rippi Karda is twelve years into her tenure at Verizon, where she serves as Associate General Counsel. In 2020 she founded Attorney of the Week — the LinkedIn series that has featured more than 300 attorneys worldwide, run singlehandedly, and has become one of the legal profession's most consistent recognition platforms for in-house counsel doing under-spotlit work. She was appointed by Governor Phil Murphy as inaugural Chair of the New Jersey AAPI Commission in 2022. She is the first South Asian to serve on the board of the Ronald McDonald House of NYC. Mentorship is core to how she shows up. The thesis underneath the awards: as she rises, she raises others.
Javaria Neagle
Javaria Neagle is approaching fourteen years in-house at United Airlines, where she serves as Associate General Counsel for Litigation, Environmental & Sustainability. She runs a team of roughly a dozen lawyers and legal professionals — the operational layer of a global carrier’s legal exposure: litigation, e-discovery, information governance, and subpoena response across the carrier’s regulatory and commercial perimeter. Beyond the day job she represents asylum seekers pro bono and is a founding board member of Dress for Success Central. She was named to Crain’s Chicago Business Notable Women in Law for 2026. She is a Leadership Council on Legal Diversity fellow. She represents the kind of senior in-house counsel whose function-level impact runs ahead of the recognition mechanisms — the operating leader whose tenure tells you what staying power looks like in a function that burns through talent.
Jason Levy
Jason Levy was promoted to Deputy General Counsel and Head of Retirement Policy at Great Gray Trust Company in March 2026, having joined the firm in October 2024 as Senior Counsel. In his expanded mandate he oversees the legal team advising on the design and operation of Great Gray's collective investment trusts and other investment solutions, and leads the firm's retirement policy and advocacy work across legislative, regulatory, and industry communities. Before Great Gray he spent thirteen years at Covington & Burling LLP, where his employee benefits and executive compensation practice included pro bono representation of the Pension Rights Center. He serves on the Pension Rights Center board of directors and holds a JD from Columbia and a BA from the University of Pennsylvania.
Ten leaders worth watching is the start, not the universe. Counsel Collective's editorial mission is to keep surfacing this work — across legal, across function, across industry — week by week as the operating context continues to shift faster than the profession's recognition mechanisms can keep up.
If you're leading legal at a company doing meaningful work, if you're an in-house counsel building a function from a blank page, if you're an attorney whose work is shaping an emerging practice area before the broader profession has named it — we'd love to talk. Counsel Collective profiles leaders whose work tells us something about what it means to lead in 2026. Reach out at counselcollective.org/nominate, or simply reply to whichever amplification of this piece you encountered first.
The next Leaders to Watch edition publishes Friday, May 29 — eight Procurement Officers pursuing AI-driven sourcing at scale.
Know a leader who belongs on this list?
Counsel Collective’s editorial mission is to keep surfacing the operators, function-builders, and ecosystem amplifiers whose work is reshaping how leadership actually happens — week by week, across function and industry.
