About

Allyson Krause, senior vice president and general counsel at Promethean, is a highly skilled in-house lawyer with almost 10 years of experience at the helm of global legal operations for the educational technology developer. Krause began her career as an assistant district attorney in Atlanta, and then worked in private practice before returning to the public sector as an assistant attorney general in Georgia as well as working in the licensing division of the State Medical and State Dental Boards. Her first move in-house was joining Southwire Company, one of the largest wire and cable manufacturers in the US. She spent nearly six years at Southwire running the gamut from contract matters and environmental matters to major acquisitions for the company. From Southwire she moved to Promethean in 2010, and was as the only legal counsel this side of the Atlantic heading up the legal work for the Americas. In 2014, she took over as senior vice president and general counsel globally. During her time at Southwire she managed the successful acquisition of one of Southwire’s major competitors. She highlights that she ‘learned an incredible amount during that process and it allowed me to be part of several other acquisitions while I was at Southwire, and it prepared me to manage several acquisitions in my role at Promethean as well as to help with the sale of Promethean itself to our current owners’. She has completely revamped Promethean’s US channel distribution model and built the privacy and security program for a cloud-based product from the ground up. Promethean pivoted from “just a hardware business” to a solutions based business with the introduction of this new cloud based software as a service product, “ClassFlow”. The product came with challenges as it collects personal information about its users, in particular, students under the age of 18. With that challenge, she worked closely with the development team to ensure that the product was built with the ever changing landscape of student data privacy regulations in mind. She identifies that ‘this has allowed me to become an expert in a whole new area of law that I knew nothing about before embarking on this new product. I have had to keep up with the data protection laws related to student and children’s data around the world’. Krause brought the IP functions of trademarks and patents in-house, where before trademarks sat in marketing and patents sat in engineering. She has ensured that every business unit engages with someone on the legal team on a monthly basis, to ensure that they are getting the support they need. Rather than being seen as a blocker or a hindrance to the business, the department is seen as a benefit and a help to getting things done. By having the business engage with legal early and often, she has avoided nearly all litigation and forged strong relationships with the company’s suppliers and partners.