Karen Lawson is SVP, Legal, Head of Data & AI Trust at Syndio, the leader in Decision Intelligence for Pay. Syndio’s AI-powered platform helps nearly 400 global enterprises, including more than half the Fortune 100, make every pay decision compliant, optimized, and aligned with business strategy, governing compensation decisions for more than 10 million employees across 100 countries. In this role, Karen leads Syndio’s approach to data governance, AI trust, and the compliance architecture behind agentic and AI-powered pay decisions.
Prior to Syndio, Karen served as VP, Deputy General Counsel, Data & AI Trust at BetterUp, advising product, engineering, and commercial teams on data governance, AI development, and cross-jurisdictional compliance for a human transformation platform used by organizations worldwide. Before that, she held AI, privacy, and product counsel roles at Workday and spent nearly a decade at Bloomberg LP, where she built and led a global legal team covering data, security, and telecom across the U.S., EMEA, and APAC.
Earlier in her career, she was a senior associate at Willkie Farr & Gallagher and designed and led international legal training programs for judges, government officials, and lawyers across Jordan, Iraq, and Egypt, work that shaped her view of how legal culture and policy context drive regulatory outcomes across jurisdictions.
Karen is DC Chapter Chair and a Founding Quantum Member of Women in AI Governance (WiAIG), where she organizes networking events, webinars, and panels on practical applications of data and AI governance. She holds an LLM in Communications Law & Advocacy from Georgetown Law and a certificate in Data Law, Policy and Regulation from the London School of Economics.