Aja Carr Favors

My work is primarily at the intersection of law, technology, and public trust. I serve as the First Deputy Corporation Counsel for the City of Chicago Department of Law, a role I began in May 2024. This position functions a lot like a chief of staff or a COO, providing leadership for the department. I recently established and now head the Office of Privacy and AI Compliance for the City of Chicago Law Department, something we hadn't had before but is obviously timely and much needed. The vast majority of my legal work centers around privacy, AI governance, and cybersecurity. Managing the privacy implications for the third largest city in the country is extremely far-reaching, and I work closely with our CISO on these issues. Before joining the City, I was Senior Counsel for Privacy and Cybersecurity with Nissan, and I spent almost 7 years as Associate General Counsel with the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. At the church, my general counsel had no interest in privacy, so all the privacy stuff, in addition to the vast majority of the transactional work, fell to me. I just kind of ended up in the privacy space, but it was really interesting and intriguing to me. I like to say that I'm a generalist who knows a lot about privacy, and I think that background has served me well. I'm a career changer - I actually started out in publishing before I went to law school. Six days before Christmas in 2023, I was diagnosed with breast cancer. I'm cancer-free now, but I went through a series of surgeries last year, and it led me down this path of being interested in public health and how I could make public health leadership align with privacy, AI, and data governance. I see things through a different lens now, especially in this space where healthcare, privacy, and all of these things intersect.