By Andrew Cohen
At every step in her career, Jeewon Kim Serrato ’04 has watched the future show up early — and rather than simply react to it, she’s worked to shape it. For 20 years as a lawyer, that meant mastering the rules: understanding what governs society and how businesses operate inside the most heavily regulated spaces.
In February, she left her position as partner and head of the consumer protection practice at Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman LLP to put that mastery to a different purpose. The pivot to leading Berkeley Law’s new Chief Privacy Officer Program, she notes, is not about leaving the law behind — it’s about bringing everything she has learned from it to build the future.
“Mastery is the license to innovate,” Serrato says. “Because I know the rules, I know what the future can look like when we bring change with intention. Lawyers can and should be the innovation engine for the future — now we can reimagine a different world by becoming creators and innovators.”
That conviction runs through everything she’s now building as the lead instructor for the Chief Privacy Officer Program, run through Berkeley Law’s Executive Education program, a training initiative for senior leaders in data strategy, innovation, governance, and risk management.
She has also co-founded Bear Financial, a startup launched with a former Meta Superintelligence Labs artificial intelligence/machine learning engineer to democratize financial planning for everyday families. And she started The K-University, a mastermind community that gives breakthrough founders the scaffolding and space to make pattern-breaking inevitable rather than accidental.
The common thread is intention. The future, Serrato argues, isn’t something that happens to us — it’s something we choose to build.
A first-of-its-kind program
Berkeley Law’s Chief Privacy Officer Program is a pathway for attorneys aligned to the State Bar of California’s new Privacy Law Specialization standards and a leadership track for privacy and data professionals preparing for C-suite go-to-market and market-entry work.
Lawyers and executives everywhere see that the days of privacy as a niche specialty are gone — no longer the domain of a compliance department or a clause buried in the terms of service, it’s now the modern world’s operating system. For Serrato, that makes mastery of privacy and AI law less a back-office function than a foundation for how companies get to market and shape their market-entry strategy.
“Because all businesses run on data, business leaders who understand how to collect, process, and use data as an asset will have a competitive edge,” she says. Noting that the Chief Privacy Officer Program will equip participants to navigate complex regulatory landscapes while driving growth and innovation, Serrato says “the leaders who lean into this now are the ones who get to shape what comes next.”
Launched in March, the program has drawn participants from all over the world, with the first cohort graduating June 12. They take seven advanced self-paced online modules led by Serrato, three interactive live online sessions with Berkeley Law privacy faculty and specialists, and an in-person capstone at UC Berkeley. They also gain one year of access to the Berkeley Center for Law and Technology’s B-CLE platform to complete the remaining 60-hour education requirement for the State Bar of California’s Privacy Law Specialization.
“Jeewon has a rare ability to translate complex privacy and AI governance challenges into clear, practical frameworks that leaders can actually use,” says former Motorola Solutions director of privacy and security Brett Cook, a program guest lecturer. “That’s what sets this program apart — it’s not theoretical, it’s built for real-world decision-making. What makes it especially compelling is its focus on how privacy operates inside organizations today, at the intersection of legal, product, and technology.
“That’s exactly where modern privacy leaders need to operate.”
By creating a learning environment that reflects how privacy and AI governance are actually practiced at the highest levels, Cook adds, Serrato is helping legal professionals build the future rather than just navigate it.
Berkeley Law Professor and program instructor Paul Schwartz calls her “incredibly knowledgeable about all aspects of data privacy and tremendously responsive to student questions,” adding that the program provides “valuable information on many cutting-edge topics, including AI, the dark web, and litigation and regulatory trends.”
A career spent ahead of the curve
That instinct reflects a career path that has been decisive, fast, and purposeful. Less than a month after enrolling at Berkeley Law, Serrato watched the world shift in real time after 9/11, which led her to consider how best to use data to solve real problems without losing principles in the process.
After graduating, she served as legislative counsel in the U.S. House of Representatives and saw national security, civil liberties, and data’s growing power collide. Frustrated at how slowly government levers moved, she traveled for nine months before delving into the privacy world — long before most saw it as a distinct field.
Serrato went on to become head of privacy at RELX Group (parent entity to LexisNexis), and chief privacy officer at Fannie Mae. The first lawyer to hold that position at both companies, she understood that privacy leadership demanded more than best practices and competitive advantage. It also required law, ethics, and judgment.
“I learned how to translate legal requirements into operational business processes, and to become an executive leader that creates synergies with the business’s strategic initiatives so that privacy becomes a competitive edge — not a cost center,” she says.
Serrato shifted to Big Law in 2015, a decade of practice that culminated in her partnership at Pillsbury. At each stop, she helped clients understand that when it comes to managing data, knowledge is meaningless without sound judgment.
“Privacy failure is not only a legal problem,” says Serrato, who managed over 600 security incidents and was named a Cybersecurity Trailblazer by the National Law Journal. “It’s an ethics problem, a trust problem, and a business problem. Doing the minimum may keep you nominally compliant, but it can still break credibility, which is the thing that matters most.”
Now chairing the State Bar of California’s Privacy Law Specialization consulting group, she worked for nearly six years persuading the Bar to establish a Privacy Law Specialization. When the Board of Trustees approved the new standards in May — acting on a recommendation from the California Board of Legal Specialization the previous December — it marked the first time the state had recognized a new specialty area of law in over two decades.
“To keep the momentum, I thought it would be important to build a program that meets the education requirement for the Bar-approved exam standards,” Serrato says. “I’m just thrilled that my alma mater Berkeley (both undergrad and law) accepted my proposal and became the first law school to provide this curriculum in the state.”
Rewriting the rules
For Serrato, the deeper project is a reinvention of the profession itself. Over her career, privacy expanded from largely Fourth Amendment issues such as search and seizure and warrantless surveillance to essentially everything: platforms, apps, devices, networks, and much more.
Today, a simple taxi ride is a dataset. The lawyers best equipped for that world, she argues, are not the ones who memorize the rules, but the ones who understand them well enough to imagine what comes next.
Her thinking draws on three works she returns to constantly: Pattern Breakers by Mike Maples Jr. and Peter Ziebelman, featuring the idea that real breakthroughs come from acting on a genuinely different view of the future; Napoleon Hill’s Think and Grow Rich, which includes the Master Mind principle — that when two minds coordinate in harmony toward a definite purpose, they create a third intelligence neither could reach alone; and Rick Rubin’s The Creative Act: A Way of Being, centered on the conviction that creation is not a profession but a way of being.
“I believe everyone is a creator. Creativity is a fundamental aspect of being human,” Serrato says. “To create is to bring something into existence that wasn’t there before. When we listen, observe, and act with intention, we can do big things.”
This belief feels especially urgent to her now. “In the AI era, that matters more than ever,” she says. “The answer to a world of automated pattern-matching isn’t less human thought. It’s great human minds, put to work intentionally, choosing to break the pattern rather than repeat it.”
That same idea animates the Chief Privacy Officer Program. With AI rapidly disrupting how business gets done, Serrato says companies need leaders who can see a legal change coming — and understand why it’s coming. Innovators read the signals, anticipate where things are heading, and create change instead of waiting for it.
“We understand where the motivation to regulate a behavior comes from, and we meet the challenge,” she says. “Because we study the trends, we can position the company strategically, prepare for what’s ahead, and keep innovating.”
Her program is built to produce exactly those leaders. “Whether you’re designing an enterprise-wide data privacy program or rolling out a new AI strategy, participants will master the frameworks that allow them to collect, share, and monetize data in a way that’s legally compliant, ethically sound, and aligned with their organization’s mission and goals.”
Knowing the rules, in other words, was never the destination. For Serrato, it was the license to imagine something new.