Leaders to WatchLegal, Spring 2026
Ten in-house and independent legal leaders shaping how counsel works in 2026, from Boston Dynamics and Verizon to United Airlines, Ohmium, and Great Gray Trust.
What does it mean to be a leader worth watching in 2026? Not the household name. 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.
The founding cohort assembled in this first Leaders to Watch edition is exactly that. 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. Protocols for placing autonomous robots alongside human workers, regulatory frameworks the law itself hasn't built, and risk in a field where the technology routinely outruns the case law. Counsel whose work shapes how an emerging industry navigates the gap between what's possible and what's permitted.
Rippi Karda
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 profession's most consistent recognition platforms for in-house counsel doing under-spotlit work. Appointed by Governor Phil Murphy as inaugural Chair of the New Jersey AAPI Commission in 2022. The thesis underneath the awards: as she rises, she raises others.
Alex Petrik
Alex Petrik stepped into the General Counsel seat at Eastern Dental after a private-equity acquisition reset the operating model, and after the company had operated for nearly five years without dedicated in-house counsel. He's building the legal function from a blank page mid-transformation: compliance overhaul, M&A in the Northeast dental market, and the institutional dynamics of an organization absorbing dedicated counsel for the first time in half a decade. The philosophy he carries from Rocket Mortgage runs through the work: legal advises, business decides.
Tiffany A. Archer
Tiffany A. Archer founded Eunomia Risk Advisory after more than twenty years inside the compliance and white-collar regulatory function, most recently as a global Chief Compliance Officer. The thesis behind Eunomia is specific: the compliance gap most growth-stage and mid-market companies face isn't a coverage problem, it's an architecture problem. Its sister practice Eunomia Global extends that architecture across Africa, Europe, the Americas, and the Middle East. The connective tissue is behavioral science. One of the few advisory practices treating compliance as a design discipline rather than a reactive function.
Joe Rubbone
Joe Rubbone is one of the operating leaders quietly reshaping how growth-stage companies buy legal. Years of in-house architecture work, most of it in the health and wellness sector, have positioned him at the front of a broader shift: counsel delivered as fractional infrastructure for businesses in the messy middle between founder-counsel coverage and full-time GC builds. The model is deliberate. The pattern is repeatable. The next chapter of his work belongs in that conversation.
Jonathan Cohen
Jonathan Cohen's tenure at PNY Technologies started as a Financial Analyst Intern and has compounded into one of the more unusual operating arcs in legal. As North America Director of Sales and Associate General Counsel, he leads inside sales, business development, Canadian Territory Sales, and the System Integration arm of PNY, while supporting legal, security, HR, and company-wide training across shared services. Ten direct reports, 100+ accounts. The throughline regardless of which department the work touches: consistency with integrity compounds.
Kieron Frazier
Kieron Frazier went to law school because he wanted to run a sports team. He became a lawyer instead, and never left the game. Years in-house at a major NFL franchise gave him something most private-practice attorneys in gaming and sports betting will never have: he's sat on the other side of the table. He knows what outside counsel miss and what in-house teams actually need. Now in private practice, he's converting fifteen-plus years of relationship capital across MLB, NFL, and NBA organizations into client work in one of the fastest-growing practice areas in law.
Catherine Budzynski
Catherine Budzynski is the CEO & Founder of Larimar Management, launched to close the gap between what general counsel need and what outside firms typically deliver. The work draws from a thirteen-year arc inside high-stakes in-house functions, most recently as the first Chief Legal Officer at Ohmium International, where she built a nine-person global legal team from scratch and helped close the company's $250 million Series C, the second-largest globally in 2023. Earlier, legal leadership at Aflac, with a start in Big Law at Skadden and Cleary Gottlieb. A charter member of TechGC and a member of Chief.
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. Beyond the day job she represents asylum seekers pro bono and is a founding board member of Dress for Success Central. Named to Crain's Chicago Business Notable Women in Law for 2026, and a Leadership Council on Legal Diversity fellow.
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 in October 2024 as Senior Counsel. 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. He serves on the Pension Rights Center board and holds a JD from Columbia.
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