Diana Santos

Diana Santos is a senior legal executive, AI governance strategist, and enterprise transformation leader with more than 15 years of experience at the intersection of law, technology, and business strategy.

She currently serves as Legal Transformation Executive at IBM, where she leads high-impact, cross-functional programs within IBM’s Legal & Regulatory Affairs – directly aligned with the Chief Legal Officer’s strategic vision – to modernize legal operations, advance responsible AI adoption across the enterprise, and reimagine how legal teams deliver value at scale. Her portfolio spans eDiscovery transformation, legal technology stack optimization, governance framework design, vendor ecosystem management, and organizational change management.

Previously, Ms. Santos served as Senior Counsel and AI Focal within the Global Markets legal team, overseeing a U.S.- and Canada-based team providing legal and regulatory support across IBM’s technology and consulting offerings, as well as IBM Global Financing.  Earlier in her tenure at IBM, Ms. Santos served as Senior Counsel and Global Generative AI Legal Lead for IBM Consulting – a 160,000-person global business unit – where she co-created and co-chaired the Consulting GenAI Compliance Committee and served as product counsel for the Consulting Advantage, a cutting-edge AI platform. In this capacity, she helped architect IBM Consulting’s generative AI governance infrastructure, established enterprise-wide compliance and contracting frameworks for client-facing AI deployments, and led a global network of attorneys across dozens of jurisdictions through a rapidly evolving regulatory landscape.

Before joining IBM, Ms. Santos served as Assistant General Counsel at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center (MSK), one of the world’s foremost cancer research and treatment institutions, where she led strategic data and technology transactions for the Digital, Informatics, and Technology Solutions (DigITs) team. Advising senior executives and closing more than 100 contracts spanning AI, cloud, SaaS, and data licensing – including the international commercialization of MSK’s proprietary IP and data assets for AI applications – she was instrumental in powering the institution’s digital transformation. Prior to MSK, as Associate Counsel at the New York Genome Center, she managed the organization’s IP portfolio, negotiated a broad range of commercial and research contracts, and counseled on genetic data privacy and compliance matters.

Ms. Santos began her legal career as a litigation and transactions associate at Ropes & Gray LLP and Willkie Farr & Gallagher LLP, advising Fortune 500 companies – including Apple, Pfizer, and RSA Security – in complex IP litigation, commercial transactions, M&A due diligence, and product counseling across the software, hardware, e-commerce, biopharmaceutical, and automotive sectors. The analytical rigor and adversarial precision cultivated in elite litigation practice continue to inform her approach to enterprise legal strategy and risk management.

Ms. Santos has also served as an Adjunct Professor at Fordham University School of Law, where she designed and taught a course on the legal dimensions of AI – covering ethics, IP, contract frameworks, and litigation. She remains an active voice in public discourse on AI governance, responsible technology deployment, and the future of the legal profession.

Her academic background is distinctively interdisciplinary. She holds a J.D. from Fordham University School of Law and an LL.M. in European Law from Université Panthéon-Assas, Collège Européen de Paris, as well as a Master of Biotechnology from the University of Pennsylvania and a Bachelor of Engineering from The Cooper Union – credentials that enable her to engage on equal footing with engineers, data scientists, product teams, and data-driven business leaders across industries.

A committed advocate for inclusion and the advancement of the legal profession, Ms. Santos has served as a Board Member of the New York Intellectual Property Law Association and as Second Vice President of the Fordham Law Alumni Attorneys of Color Affinity Group, and currently serves on the Hispanic National Bar Association’s Special Committee on AI. She is a recipient of the ABA Business Law Fellowship, has been recognized among the Hispanic National Bar Association’s Top Lawyers Under 40, and was a Leadership Council on Legal Diversity Fellow in 2019.

Ms. Santos brings to any engagement a rare combination: the legal depth of a Big Law litigator, the commercial acumen of a seasoned transactional attorney, the strategic perspective of a C-suite transformation leader, and the technological fluency of a genuine AI practitioner.

Education

Harvard Law School Executive Education, Program on Negotiation Certificate

Fordham University School of Law, J.D.

Université Panthéon–Assas, Collège Européen de Paris, Master of Laws in European Law

University of Pennsylvania, M.B., Bioengineering

The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, Bachelor of Engineering