AffiniPay, the parent company of payments platform LawPay and practice management platform MyCase, today named Catherine Dawson, a lawyer with 20 years of experience in data privacy, cybersecurity and mergers and acquisitions, as its general counsel. The news comes a week after AffiniPay named another woman to its executive suite, marketing and software executive Ana Villegas as its chief marketing officer.
The company’s C-suite already included a woman CEO, Dru Armstrong, and a woman EVP of people resources, Erin Brooks. The company was founded by a woman, Amy Porter, who remains its executive chairperson.
This news is particularly noteworthy given that women and people of color remain underrepresented among legal technology founders and executives. Asurvey last year by Kristen Sonday, cofounder and COO of legal tech startup Paladin, found just 57 women founders of legal technology companies.
Dawson (pictured right above) joins AffiniPay from the data privacy company Osano, where she had been general counsel and chief privacy officer since December 2020. Before that, she was chief legal officer at another data privacy company, Spiceworks.
Earlier in her career, she was an attorney with the firm Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati for 10 years, and also worked at the firms Gunderson Dettmer and Jones Day.
Before joining AffiniPay, Villegas (pictured left above) was chief marketing officer at National Instruments, where she facilitated the company’s global rebrand and led worldwide marketing, corporate impact and communications strategies. Prior to NI, she spent more than 16 years at Dell leading digital marketing initiatives, as well as launching digital payments in the financial sector in Peru.
She is originally from Peru.
