Natalie LaPorta Returns to Lead

Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...

Natalie LaPorta had to leave Walgreens and ultimately prove herself so invaluable as outside counsel that the organization saw fit to take on privacy lawyers internally—and hire her back for good.

The current chief privacy officer at Walgreens spent the first four years of her career in a nonlegal position despite having her JD.

After graduating from law school, she spent three years in a privacy compliance role at Walgreens. While she loved working for Walgreens, she wanted to practice law. LaPorta knew she needed more experience. This is where the story gets especially interesting.

LaPorta reached out to a recruiter who told her, in no uncertain terms, that because she didn’t have a degree from Harvard or Yale, the recruiter couldn’t do much for her. Still, the recruiter asked if she would be willing to be introduced to another lawyer at Walgreens who might have some ideas.

LaPorta didn’t hang up or spew rancor at the recruiter, who was uncharacteristically blunt in their assessment.

“I welcomed the honesty,” LaPorta remembers. “If that was the reality, I was grateful they weren’t going to waste my time. And so I agreed to meet the other lawyer.”

Through that connection, LaPorta learned that Dentons’ healthcare practice was looking for an associate with privacy experience, and she went on to join the firm. There, she practiced privacy law in addition to other health care transactions, regulatory, and finance matters. She made herself so indispensable to the Walgreens legal team that Walgreens hired her as outside counsel.

“I was fortunate to benefit from good timing and a strong relationship built with the lawyer who asked to take over the privacy function at Walgreens,” LaPorta says. “I wound up doing a lot of work as outside counsel, and two years later, I was asked to return and start building out the privacy legal function. It was a hard decision to leave private practice, but I knew that the in-house experience was where I was looking to spend the bulk of my career.”

LaPorta came back to Walgreens, hired two attorneys who still work for her today, and began building out the function from scratch. Well, not from scratch, exactly, because LaPorta knew so much of the company.

“I’ve watched this organization run a retail and specialty pharmacy, retail, healthcare clinics, and websites and mobile applications,” the CPO says. “If you’re going to make privacy work for the business as well as the customer and patient, you have to know what each part of that looks like. Privacy as a theory doesn’t matter at all if you can’t put it into practice.”

What LaPorta didn’t want to do as she was building the function was to break down any of the strong relationships she had built across the legal division. She knew showing up in a department and telling them her team was functionally taking over all privacy concerns would ruffle more feathers than build relationships.

“If you’re going to make privacy work for the business as well as the customer and patient, you have to know what each part of that looks like. Privacy as a theory doesn’t matter at all if you can’t put it into practice.”

Natalie LaPorta

Instead, LaPorta and her people showed up asking if they could take over the heavy lifting of privacy responsibilities. They emphasized that the privacy team was in no way trying to take over anyone’s functions or other concerns. They wanted to support and collaborate with their hard-working legal colleagues.

Her recognition of how to handle internal communications and relationships is telling and perhaps part of the reason she was most recently appointed the chief privacy officer. It’s because of that approach that she’s now the regular first call for people across the Walgreens organization. LaPorta also thinks it’s the reason the two attorneys she’s hired have stayed with her all these years.

“Our privacy team wants to enable the business. A project team will come to us and tell us they want to do X, Y, and Z,” LaPorta explains. “That’s when we start asking questions. What are you looking to accomplish? What does great versus good look like to you here? That’s where we start, and that allows us to work through potential alternatives if X, Y, and Z might need to look a little different. We understand we are a support function, and we’re there to ultimately get the business where it wants to go.”

“In our role as Natalie’s trusted advisor, we have seen firsthand how she delivers on the value of creating strong, transparent relationships,” says Vickie B. Ahlers, partner and chair of the healthcare practice Group at Baird Holm LLP. “This approach puts Natalie and her team at the table for critical conversations and keeps privacy at the forefront of key initiatives. It has been a privilege to work with such a talented and committed leader.”

The chief privacy officer says a critical piece of being a good business partner is communication. She holds cross-functional weekly working groups and monthly steering committee meetings on privacy that allow the organization to hear both from the privacy and government relations team about best practices and expectations. She also facilitates breakout sessions where people can talk through specific projects or ideas.

Those sessions also give the representatives from cross-functional teams some idea of what may be coming down the pike, how new legislation and laws might affect their plans, and what the “now vs. later” approach concerning that legislation might require in evolution and planning. What’s built right now may need to evolve as different privacy legislation goes into effect or is adopted in different geographies.

“It’s a chance for us to meet with IT and our digital marketing teams and think about the future,” LaPorta explains. “We think of worst-case scenario environments, how we could respond, and how we can keep our patients’ and customers’ data secure while keeping the business humming along.”

LaPorta’s commitment to enabling business, not stifling it, is simply a part of her practice. She’s absorbed so much of Walgreens into her approach to the business that it’s almost second nature. As she continues to look out for consumer and patient privacy, she’ll be taking on new challenges—like the constantly evolving definition of what constitutes AI—while keeping her internal clients happy. It’s a lot to balance, but LaPorta knows Walgreens inside and out.

---