By MICHAEL FISCH
features
Return to Table of Contents
winter 2025
From her office in Silicon Valley, Cheree L. McAlpine, JD ’94, shapes how one of tech's most well-known companies navigates a complex digital world. As Zoom's chief legal officer, she’s grappling with responsible use of AI, global privacy concerns, and the lightning pace of technological change. Her approach remains grounded in some of the core principles of advocacy she learned at Suffolk Law—skills she was honing long before Zoom became a household word. McAlpine has been working at the intersection of law and technology for 30 years, including serving as general counsel for Avnet Americas and Wyse Technology, where she managed the latter company’s successful sale to Dell.
Tell us about your path to becoming a lawyer.
I grew up in Valley, Alabama, right on the Alabama-Georgia border. When I went to Suffolk, I'd never even met a lawyer before. My only frame of reference for lawyers came from TV shows, where they were usually litigators who could solve any problem in 45 minutes. That's not the most accurate depiction of what a legal career really looks like.
As that young girl from rural Alabama, I wouldn’t have imagined myself being a tech lawyer in Silicon Valley, but when I started building my career there, I developed a real love for the law, the tech industry, and innovation. It became an ambition I felt I could achieve if I was strategic and worked hard.
How technical do you need to be for this role?
I'm probably as far from being a "tech person" as you can get. I was an English literature major who always loved reading and writing. What I've discovered in my 30-year career as a tech lawyer is that you don't have to understand the technical minutiae. You do need to be tech-savvy enough to understand the issues around the technology, and, more importantly, you need to understand the business and how to advocate for your client. These are fundamentals I learned at Suffolk—understanding advocacy and how to dig into key issues.
What's the structure of your legal department at Zoom?
We have a global team of 155 people, including a large team supporting our commercial practice and another group handling product-related issues. The compliance organization also reports to me, which includes our chief privacy officer and the trust and safety department, ensuring users have a safe environment on our platform. Smaller teams handle employment, litigation, and regulatory matters. Being a global company means we're operating across multiple time zones. Sometimes, I'm up at 4 a.m. dealing with urgent issues that can't wait for California business hours.
How do you handle privacy and AI challenges?
One thing that's unique about this moment is that the laws are struggling to catch up with AI technology. We've seen this before with social media and the dot-com era, but the pace of AI deployment is unprecedented. It's not just laws alone that will drive usage of AI–companies have to be principled about data use. We have to navigate this on multiple levels: global data regulations, federal requirements, and increasingly, state-specific laws about things like biometric data. Europe got out front first with GDPR [General Data Protection Regulation, the EU's comprehensive privacy law], setting the tone for how we look at privacy and data use, and now other regions are catching up.
What advice do you have for young lawyers?
First, be strategic about your career. Don't just sit back and let the work speak for itself. Know where you're trying to go, what that next role looks like, and talk to mentors who've been in that position. Second, to sit in the C-suite, you've got to have the ability to solve problems. You need to understand the pain points in an organization and figure out your role in fixing them. As a senior leader, it's your job to manage the big issues of the company.
Photograph courtesy of Cheree McAlpine/Zoom