Associate Vice President and Counsel
Government Relations and Public Policy,
Association of American Universities
Kate Hudson is the Associate Vice President and Counsel for Government Relations and Public Policy for the Association of American Universities. Her portfolio includes intellectual property, technology transfer, open science and public access, data privacy, and copyright issues. In addition, she supports AAU’s policy and federal relations work in areas that require legal expertise, such as tax issues related to endowments, research, labor and employment, research security policy, higher education Title IX issues, and other regulatory matters important to America’s leading research universities. Kate also leads AAU’s General Counsels (GC) constituent group and Intellectual Property & Tech Transfer Task Force.
Prior to joining AAU, Kate served in the U.S. federal government as a senior attorney-advisor in the legislative and executive branches, most recently with the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO). At GAO, she provided legal counsel on a range of issues including interagency governance bodies, federal financial management, legislative drafting, and technical advice to Congress. Before her work at GAO, Kate served as an attorney-advisor with the U.S. Office of Personnel Management (OPM), as both an administrative litigator before the Merit Systems Protection Board (MSPB) and the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) and regulatory counsel. Additionally, she served as agency counsel for three years in the federal litigation surrounding the 2015 OPM cyberbreach case (In re: OPM, 928 F.3d 42 (D.C. Cir. 2019), the largest federal class action privacy lawsuit in U.S. history. Before serving at OPM, she was the inaugural director of the Executive branch CXO Fellows Program at the U.S. General Services Administration (GSA) and as a key member of the Office of Government-wide Policy (OGP) providing programmatic support to the Office of the Chief Information Security Officer (OCIO), the Office of Federal Financial Management (OFFM), and the Office of Federal Procurement Policy (OFPP) at the U.S. Office of Management & Budget (OMB).
Before her federal government service, Kate began her legal career as an attorney with the Georgia Legal Service Program (GLSP) Augusta office, providing comprehensive civil and administrative representation to low-income and indigent clients in a thirteen-county area in rural Georgia. Following a move to North Carolina, she became an assistant public defender with the NC Office of the Public Defender in the 13th Judicial District, where she represented clients in criminal misdemeanor, felony, and parole proceedings. Following the subprime mortgage crisis of 2008, Kate became a staff attorney with Legal Aid of North Carolina (LANC) as part of the Mortgage Foreclosure Defense Project, representing clients both in federal and state courts in affirmative litigation on a wide range of special proceedings actions including emergency bankruptcy petitions and negotiating loan modifications to save clients’ homes from unlawful foreclosure in a nine-county area. Before law school, Kate worked in government relations with the American Hospital Association (AHA) and as a data analyst with the National Committee for an Effective Congress (NCEC).
An active volunteer, Kate is a member of the Military Spouse JD Network (MSJDN), the Women’s Bar Association of the District of Columbia (WBA), and Women in Government Relations (WGR). She also provides pro bono legal services to District of Columbia residents through Whitman-Walker Health and the District of Columbia Bar Association Volunteer Lawyers Project.
She holds a Master of Public Administration and Policy from American University, a Juris Doctorate from the University of Dayton School of Law, and both a Master and Bachelor of Arts in Political Science from Ohio University. She is licensed to practice law in Georgia, North Carolina, and the District of Columbia. An active-duty Army spouse of 18 years, she currently resides in northern Virginia with her husband and two children.