Teresa Jedd Hutson ’01 had spent her career finding the niches where she can “see the people in the law.” Now, as Microsoft’s new corporate vice president and general counsel for technology and services, she’s trying to bring that humanistic approach to the place where bleeding-edge tech interacts with the everyday people whose lives it affects.
“We’re building enterprise technology, but enterprises are made up of the people who use it,” she said. “So what do they care about and worry about?”
In January, Hutson, who is closing in on two decades at Microsoft, was promoted to her new role at the Redmond, Washington–based tech giant. She’s tasked with leading the global legal team that manages the legal requirements govern-ing how Microsoft builds and sells products, and how it engages with regulatory domains like responsible AI, digital safety, privacy, accessibility and human rights. Previously, she had been serving as corporate vice president of technology for fundamental rights; earlier roles included vice president of tech and corporate responsibility, and working as an employment attorney on cross-border employment and immigration.
“My goal is really to integrate the organization so that we are thinking about how we build and deploy products in the most responsible way, thinking about how we build so that we’re taking into account both the positive ways technology can be used, but also potential negative ways,” she said. “The mission of the team is to enable fast innovation while preserving trust.”
A key aspect of Hutson’s job is enabling two-way flows of information, so Microsoft engineers understand the needs of customers, regulators and other external stakeholders, and those outside actors have a sense of what is possible with how the company builds technology. She said that engaging with advocacy organizations like human rights and privacy groups, disability rights activists, and labor unions such as the American Federation of Teachers and the Communication Workers of America has given the company a better sense of what users are getting from its products, and what more they need.
In fast-moving domains like AI, as global regulators consider potential actions, Hutson said Microsoft is trying to voluntarily impose steps to guard against harms—like commit-ting to transparency reporting and multiple layers of review for sensitive technology uses—in order to keep users on board. “People don’t use technology they don’t trust,” Hutson said. “What are the best practices we can impose on ourselves that demonstrate that we take the responsibility of building cutting edge and innovative technology like AI thoughtfully?”
“There’s a real sense that people don’t want to be experimented on. There’s no patience left,” Hutson added. “And so we’re really thinking about what it takes to demonstrate that we are building technology that is thinking about the harms it can cause.”
Hutson has increasingly been incorporating artificial intelligence into her own workflow, whether that be for basic research decoding computer engineers’ tech-speak or designing personalized tutorial to teach herself about using agentic AI. Looking ahead at a future where AI is increasingly disruptive to the legal community, Hutson sees the need for lawyers to start emphasizing systems and design thinking, and finding connections. Stereotypically, the law is a back-wards-looking profession, obsessed with precedents and worst-case scenarios. “But if you’re advising a company, what you’re really trying to do is think about things looking forward at scale,” Hutson said. “Trying to figure out how to hold both of those things, the precedent and edge cases with looking forward at scale, is the most helpful way to frame legal advice and to really be more of a systems thinker and a design thinker. I think that will also help people with the transition to a more AI enabled practice.”
Hutson’s own path to the law wasn’t preordained. With undergraduate degrees in English and education, she originally thought she was going to be a high school teacher. Her student-teaching experence gave her second thoughts, though, and law school beckoned.
One problem: Growing up in a small town in Western New York, Hutson’s exposure to legal work had been extremely limited. She hadn’t known any lawyers. She never spent time as a paralegal. “There were a lot of people at Cornell who were like, ‘I’ve always wanted to be a lawyer.’ That wasn’t me,” she said. “I was like, ‘What am I doing here?”
“I didn’t know what a tort was. I thought it was a cake,” she added with a laugh. “It took me a couple months to actually figure that out.”
Torts ended up being one of her favorite classes, as Professor James A. Henderson Jr. regaled his students with stories. But it was her third-year employment law class with Professor Stewart J. Schwab that made her think, “Oh, that’s what I want to do.”
Cornell Law School had other lasting payoffs for Hutson: she met her future husband, Josh Hutson ’01. They returned to Ithaca to get married, in a ceremony where their Law School classmates made up a good half of the guests.
When Hutson discovered employment law as a 3L, she had already accepted a corporate law position after graduation. She was laid off a year later in the dot-com bubble collapse, though, jumped at the opportunity to switch tracks and go into employment law at Paul Hastings.
Ultimately, though, being in-house at Microsoft suited her better than the more atomized work done at a law firm with a long list of clients. “One of the things I love about being in-house is you really do under-stand who you work for in a different way. You also get to be super pragmatic, which suits me,” said Hutson. “In employment law, one of the things that I used to say was that the best way to mitigate legal risk is to treat employees with respect. That’s not really legal advice. That’s just human advice, but I love that that is something you can say as a part of the job [at Microsoft] and it’s valued. You could say that as an outside lawyer, but nobody really wants to pay you to say that by the hour.”
~Ian McGullam
