Virginia (Ginny) Johnson brings nearly 25 years of cross-sector legal, compliance, governance, and regulatory experience to Outside GC. She has held senior leadership roles across industrial manufacturing, energy, specialty chemicals, insurance and financial services, spanning publicly traded, privately held, and PE/VC-backed businesses.  Ginny routinely advises boards of directors, C-suite executives, investors, and founders throughout all phases of company growth.  Her diverse range of experience gives Ginny an operator’s perspective on every client engagement.

Ginny works where legal exposure meets business strategy: pressure-testing risk, weighing tradeoffs, and advising management teams and boards on what to do next, not merely what the law says. Pairing sharp legal judgment with commercial pragmatism, she frames risk in business terms and delivers guidance that accelerates growth while minimizing disruption and cost. Her unique cross-sector fluency allows her to move quickly into unfamiliar businesses — mature public company environments and fast-scaling PE/VC-backed startup ecosystems alike — learning the commercial and regulatory landscape and building the legal and compliance infrastructure the organization needs.

Ginny advises clients across a wide range of industries on:

• Fractional and interim Chief Legal Officer/General Counsel engagements
• Corporate governance, board advisory, and corporate secretary support
• Board and committee self-evaluations and director skills assessments
• Public company reporting, SEC compliance, and disclosure strategy
• Enterprise risk management, ethics and compliance programs, and internal investigations
• Sustainability program development and ESG reporting
• AI governance, policy implementation, and responsible AI deployment
• Legal operations, data governance, privilege mapping and litigation risk avoidance
• Cybersecurity readiness, incident response, and data privacy and protection
• Mergers & acquisitions, divestitures, joint ventures and post-closing integration
• Capital markets, equity offerings, debt financings, and strategic transactions
• PE/VC growth-stage transactions and portfolio company matters
• Commercial transactions, software licensing, and vendor management
• Regulatory examinations, investigations, and complex dispute resolution
• Employment law matters, HR support, and executive compensation

Prior to joining Outside GC, Ginny was Chief Legal Officer, General Counsel, Corporate Secretary, and Chief Compliance Officer of Aspen Aerogels, Inc. (NYSE: ASPN). Earlier, she served as General Counsel of Schneider Electric North America, and as Senior Vice President, Associate General Counsel and Head of Corporate Legal at Global Atlantic Financial Group (formerly Goldman Sachs Reinsurance Group, now KKR). Across these roles she built and led global legal and compliance functions, managed public company reporting and board governance, negotiated mission-critical commercial and M&A transactions, supported capital raises and complex financing transactions, designed and implemented ethics and compliance and enterprise risk management programs, drove sustainability and ESG reporting, stood up contracting and procurement functions, and spearheaded enterprise-wide legal technology implementations and AI governance frameworks.

Ginny began her career in private practice as an associate at Weil, Gotshal & Manges LLP in the Securities & Corporate Governance and Complex Commercial Litigation practice groups, and later as a partner in the Litigation Department of Prince Lobel Tye LLP. That foundation still shapes her approach to advising clients today: she evaluates transactions and governance decisions with a clear view of how they are likely to be tested later. Having worked both sides of a closing — negotiating the deal and then living with it — she structures transactions with close attention to the integration, compliance and governance obligations that surface long after signing.

Ginny earned her J.D. from the Cardozo School of Law at Yeshiva University in New York City, and her B.A. in Political Science, magna cum laude, from Boston University. She is admitted to practice law in the state and federal courts of Massachusetts and New York.

Outside of her practice, Ginny is actively engaged in the legal profession and her local community in a number of ways. She is co-lead of the Boston chapter of The Legal Mentor Network and a member of the Governance Committee of the Board of Directors of the Animal Rescue League of Boston. She also serves on the Advisory Board of Bombellii Ventures and as an Operating Advisor at Mendoza Ventures, two Boston-based, tech-focused venture capital firms. When she is not practicing law, Ginny enjoys boxing, powerlifting, swimming, travel, live music and theater, angel investing, and hiking local trails with her husband and their Samoyed.