Kristi Fielder is an Award-Winning Attorney Who Pairs Passion with In-house Excellence

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When faced with a worldwide pandemic, Kristi Fielder had just one question: “How can I help?” Despite the fact that her family was in the process of moving from Massachusetts to Georgia, despite a career transition, and full worldwide shutdown, Corpay’s current senior litigation counsel could be found sewing masks in her attic for medical associations that were distributing hard-to-come-by masks to patients and staff alike.

“I had a friend of a friend who was a doctor in a rural emergency room who didn’t have access to PPE,” Fielder remembers. “I was just trying to find a way to help in a period of time where we all felt kind of helpless.”

But Fielder’s efforts would soon grow out of the attic. She eventually joined upstart nonprofit Project N95, in a job that started as a part-time role reviewing contracts but evolved to her taking on general counsel duties. Project N95 would go on to distribute more than 37 million units of PPE, donate over five million items to individuals in need, and vet more than 9,800 products to ensure product safety for users of equipment.

For her role, Fielder was awarded the Amicus Mundi Award from nonprofit We The Action, an organization that connects attorneys like Fielder with nonprofits like Project N95.

“As lawyers, we have an obligation to do pro bono work and give back to the community,” Fielder told We The Action. “That’s an important piece of being a member of the bar.”

 The attorney didn’t bring up the award, she brought up the people she worked with. The longtime attorney said she had the opportunity to collaborate with cutting-edge professionals and some of the very best in their industries, from law to tech to healthcare and beyond. It’s the kind of mind-set that’s critical to being an effective in-house counsel.

Fielder got her start in-house straight out of law school at Northwestern. An internship at General Motors gave way to nearly three decades with GM-affiliated companies. It was challenging work straight out of the gate, and something quite different from what her contemporaries were experiencing.

“People told me what a mistake I was making by not going to a law firm,” Fielder remembers. “But a year or so later, I was working with the senior partners they were working for, while they were locked in a library somewhere. I’m not saying my path was better or worse, but I just try and encourage young lawyers to be open to something that may look a little different than the traditional path.”

The attorney would move her family to Germany for three years with Opel, then a GM division, during a period of corporate globalization. She managed international product liability, advised on regulatory compliance and product safety across jurisdictions, and even helped launch OnStar in Europe. It’s easy to forget just how groundbreaking OnStar was in the current age, where our phones are broadcasting our locations to seemingly anyone, all the time. But in the late nineties and early 2000s, OnStar’s ability to locate and directly contact passengers involved in accidents was nothing short of revolutionary.

Working across Europe honed Fielder’s cross-cultural communication skills, patience, and collaborative approach, which is now a hallmark of her people leadership.

Fielder came to global payments leader Corpay at the beginning of 2025, and like so much of her career, this is a new avenue for her.

“Financial services is quite different from anything I’ve done before, but that’s part of what interested me in the first place,” the senior counsel says. “This is a dynamic company growing at a breakneck pace, and we’re doing everything from supporting FEMA and Red Cross providing lodging for disaster relief, helping out distressed airline passengers, and a whole range of other B2B payment services.”

That’s just part of Fielder’s work, but given her background, it’s work she’s excited to take part in. In her role, Fielder says she’s able to apply decades of experience to help the business get to where it wants to be as efficiently as possible. And she loves the opportunity to help create solutions to problems before they ever have the chance to become problems in the first place.

“I’m great at putting out fires, and it can be fun, but that’s not good for a company,” Fielder explains. “The more you can be involved upstream to proactively head off potential conflict, the better off the organization is going to be. The key is to do it in a way that doesn’t impede the business folks.”

Fielder says building those kinds of efficiencies gives more time back to everyone involved to engage in the business of the business and help propel a growing company even further ahead.

Kristi Fielder seems to feel the way about her career that we all hope to. It may not look like a conventional path, but it’s been interesting, and it’s been fun. And she’s literally had the opportunity to save some lives in the process. What more can you hope for? 

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