Jannie Lau is a Senior Consultant at The Leader’s Edge and a former Fortune 500 leader turned executive coach. Jannie is a lawyer and retired technology company executive who currently serves on the Board of Directors of Arduro Sustainable Rubber Inc. and as the Vice Chair of the Asian American Advisory Council within the Comcast NBCUniversal Joint Diversity Advisory Council (JDC). Comprised of national leaders in business, politics and civil rights, the JDC provides advice to senior executives at Comcast and NBCUniversal regarding the development and implementation of diversity, inclusion, and social justice initiatives.
In her previous role, Jannie was the Executive Vice President, Chief Legal Officer, General Counsel and Corporate Secretary of InterDigital, Inc., then an S&P 400® multinational mobile and video technology company (NASDAQ: IDCC). Reporting to the President and Chief Executive Officer, she managed the company’s global legal and government affairs functions, including a worldwide team of over 100 professionals, and advised the Board of Directors on legal, governance and compliance matters. During Jannie’s tenure at InterDigital, she led the company through the negotiation, consummation, and integration of its transformative acquisition of the R&D and licensing business divisions of Technicolor SA, the French multimedia and technology company.
At InterDigital, Jannie played a highly strategic role. Her department, the second largest within the company, was directly responsible for building and maintaining the world-class patent portfolio that generated the vast majority of the company’s revenues. Jannie has represented the company before the United States Congress and various executive branch and EU agencies and successfully resolved multiple investigations into the company’s standard-essential-patent licensing practices by competition authorities in the United States, Europe, and Asia.
Prior to joining InterDigital, Jannie served as securities and transactional counsel at IKON Office Solutions, Inc., then a Fortune® 500 technology company. Before beginning her in-house career, she was a corporate associate at leading global law firms in New York and Boston, where she represented public and pre-IPO companies, primarily in the high technology sector, with respect to securities regulation, mergers and acquisitions, financings and corporate governance matters and counseled private equity and venture capital fund managers on capital formations, portfolio investments and general governance issues.
Jannie currently serves on the Board of Trustees and the Board of Governors of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and on the Board of Directors of the Committee of Seventy. Additionally, she has served on the Advisory Board of Holistic Industries, one of the largest private, vertically integrated, multi-state operators in the cannabis industry, since 2017. Jannie is a strong champion of women and has advised numerous leaders in her career to overcome a variety of challenges and achieve success. Among other recognitions, Jannie has been honored as one of Pennsylvania’s “Most Powerful & Influential Women” by the National Diversity Council and as a “Woman of the Year” by The Legal Intelligencer.
Jannie is an honors graduate of the University of Pennsylvania Law School, where she served as Executive Editor of Volume 150 of the University of Pennsylvania Law Review and was admitted to the Order of the Coif. Jannie earned a Bachelor of Arts in English and Comparative Literature from Columbia College of Columbia University. She lives in Villanova, Pennsylvania, with her husband, Todd C. Longsworth, and their two children.