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Looking back, Meredith Carlo jokes that she didn’t wind up too far from the rest of her family, though it sure seemed like it at the time. Carlo was the sole lawyer in a family of engineers. The youngest of three watched her two brothers follow in their father’s footsteps, while Carlo was always marching to a slightly different beat.
But “technology ultimately found me,” jokes Carlo, vice president and associate general counsel for platform and enterprise products at Fidelity National Information Services (FIS). “I’ve been a tech-focused lawyer for almost all of my career. I just got there a little differently than the rest of my family.”
Carlo came to the globally operational Fortune 500 fintech company in 2020 and has been promoted twice to her current position. This achievement is impressive for any in-house attorney, especially one who restarted her career at forty.
From the outset, Carlo knew she was going to be a lawyer. That determination pushed her from James Madison University to Harvard Law and then to law firm Morgan, Lewis & Bockius, where she spent nine years. The lawyer thought she wanted to pursue employment law, but when she encountered the firm’s trademark and technology group, the subject matter came alive.
“I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to apply [to FIS]. It was everything I love: software, technology, contracts, and applying existing concepts and laws in a brand new way.”
Meredith Carlo
Her practice coincided with the entire world slowly moving onto the internet. Every day, Carlo found herself trying to apply traditional laws to technology that no one had ever dreamed of at the time of legislators’ writing. Having to grapple with these complex ideas straight out of law school may shed some light on how Carlo’s nontraditional work path has still been so successful.
While at the firm, Carlo married and started a family. When her third child was born, she and her family moved from the DC area to Jacksonville, Florida, where they knew absolutely nobody. Carlo settled down to raise her children, the oldest aged seven. Carlo fell in love with the city, but her marriage ended shortly thereafter. At the age of forty, Carlo was not licensed to practice law in Florida and had to restart her career.
So she took and passed the Florida Bar. And while taking care of three kids, she found an esteemed small law firm that took her on part-time. A few years later, Carlo and a friend opened their own successful title business. She enjoyed practicing law and running her own business, but then a friend alerted her to a job opening at FIS.
“I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to apply,” Carlo says. “It was everything I love: software, technology, contracts, and applying existing concepts and laws in a brand new way.” Her hiring coincided almost exactly with the pandemic shutdown of 2020. She became the first FIS lawyer onboarded entirely remotely.
The role has been everything she hoped for, requiring her to put all her legal experience, from one of the largest law firms in the world to her own operation, to work. The VP says working for a truly global company, one with over 57,000 employees in sixty-one countries, is the kind of challenge she relishes. It’s afforded her the opportunity to meet and develop relationships with people all over the world. It’s also required her to continue to expand her capabilities.
Case in point: FIS chose Carlo to lead business legal for its platform and enterprise products division. The business was brand new, so much so that Carlo jokes she had to explain to every person inside FIS what her new business line was for her first six months in the role. Carlo built out her team over 2024 and says that though the process required a lot of work, she loved it.
The same can likely be said about being a mother. At the moment, Carlo’s children are either in college or early in their careers. Carlo calls them her greatest achievement.
“I hope they would consider me their rock,” Carlo says. “My goal was to raise good human beings. They’re wonderful, but they did that on their own. I tried to model good behavior and show them the value of hard work and humility.”
With her children grown, Carlo has started traveling more, which wasn’t much of a possibility when her kids were younger. Also, as a new “empty nester,” the lawyer says she’s now focused on “building my own house.” It’s a chance to start something new yet again.
