Public Service

Moving the Fed Forward

Former litigator Kate Fulton (’05) uses her legal training and problem-solving savvy to help the Federal Reserve operate smoothly.

“That is not what happened. I don’t even practice law,” Fulton (’05) says. “But I have an amazing career that I’m really proud of. Law school opens up a whole lot of career opportunities, and I’m grateful that I didn’t keep those blinders on.”

Rather than a straight upward climb, Fulton’s career has taken a series of right turns, resembling more of a lattice than a ladder.

Today, Fulton works for the Federal Reserve in Washington, DC, as deputy director of operations for the Fed’s Division of Supervision and Regulation. As an operations professional, she says, her job is to ensure the backbone of her organization is strong and working well.

“I want to make sure that we have the people, the processes, the technology, and the communication to carry out the mission.”

Fulton’s calendar is packed with meetings—often 10 a day. She’s constantly gathering information about roadblocks that arise in her organization. Her job is to find ways to remove those barriers so her team can more efficiently do its work: supervising and regulating financial institutions and activities with the goal of promoting a safe, sound, and stable financial system that supports the growth and stability of the US economy.

Rooted in the Law

Operations management was nowhere on Fulton’s radar during her education. She studied communications at the University of Maryland and then attended law school because being an attorney seemed a good fit for someone who’d always enjoyed making and defending an argument. Fulton loved law school, she says, because BU Law provided an environment for good-natured conversation and debate.

“Whether because I actually meant it or just enjoyed the conversation, I took some fairly extreme positions in conversations about the law with friends at BU,” Fulton says. “And I tell you, that ability that I gained at BU to debate an issue respectfully and maintain relationships is something that benefits me every day.”

Fulton’s early interests were civil rights and discrimination. After law school, she worked at law firms that specialized in employment discrimination, litigating cases for federal employees who believed they’d been fired, disciplined, or passed over for promotions for illegal reasons.

That work sparked Fulton’s interest in the ways federal agencies craft and implement employment policies, which led to her career’s first right turn: In 2009, Fulton left her law firm for a job as an attorney advisor for US Customs and Border Protection. Working inside a federal agency, she says, gave her opportunities to improve employment policies and practices, helping to avoid the types of lawsuits she’d previously litigated.

Building a Niche in Finance

In 2013, Fulton moved to the newly formed Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), motived by the bureau’s mission and by the chance to shape the practices of a new agency. Soon after she arrived, the CFPB’s workforce voted to unionize, and Fulton served as an attorney for the team negotiating the bureau’s first collective bargaining agreement. She is proud of the work she did, she says, to understand the interests of all stakeholders and to help negotiate an agreement that included a mix of established best practices and fresh ideas.

Fulton’s career took another turn in 2015, when she moved to a job at the CPFB that had nothing to do with employment law. In her new role, she provided legal advice to senior leadership related to the CPFB’s core mission of ensuring consumers are treated fairly by lenders and other financial institutions.

“I’m forever grateful to the people who gave me that opportunity,” Fulton says. “That complete jump from one area of law to another was really challenging, but really satisfying.”

Working closely with senior leaders, she says, piqued her interest in operations.

“You can’t execute the mission of a federal agency if you don’t run it well,” she says. “If trains aren’t running on time, if you haven’t set up good processes, good governance, good controls.”

In 2018 Fulton was named the CPFB’s chief operating officer (COO). Two years later, she became COO of another financial regulator, the Federal Housing Finance Agency. In 2021, she took her current job at the Federal Reserve.

“As I’ve moved through the financial world, the Federal Reserve was always the gold standard—no pun intended,” she says. “It’s the central bank of the United States. I couldn’t pass up a chance to contribute to that mission.”

A Clear Mission and A Powerful Skillset

Fulton enjoys working at the Fed for the same reasons she’s enjoyed all her government positions. Whether working at a law enforcement agency like Customs and Border Protection or a financial one like the CPFB, she says, the mission is clear: you serve the public. You don’t work to earn a profit but to bring about the best outcomes for the American people.

Achieving good outcomes as an operations manager, she says, requires good “people skills”—knowing how to connect and communicate with people and how to trust them with what you’ve delegated to them. It also requires a nimbleness of perspective, an ability to transition from seeing the nitty-gritty technicalities to taking in the broader strategic view, and then using both perspectives to make good decisions.

Ultimately, she says, working in operations is about solving problems, something her legal training prepared her to do.

“On law school finals, you’d be given a scenario, just a set of facts, and then you’d have to analyze how the law would apply and how it would resolve,” she says. “That’s what I do every day. I have a problem. I have to go out and find what rules apply. What governs this? What are the restraints? What are the opportunities? And how do they connect? There’s never just one rule. There are always overlapping rules, and finding the intersection of them and then applying those to the facts in a way that gets the best outcome—that’s my job. The legal skills are critical.”

Fulton’s colleagues tend to have PHDs and MBAs, not JDs. She’s sometimes asked if she regrets going to law school, given how her career turned out. Her response is an emphatic no.

“I would not be here if I hadn’t gone to law school and had those experiences,” she says. Legal training has made her not only a better professional, she adds, but also a better person.

“My ability to, in a disimpassioned way, analyze a situation and come up with a path forward—that helps me in dealing with my teenage daughter, helps me in navigating big-ticket conversations with my husband. Should we buy this house? Should we move to the city? The skillset doesn’t just translate into a good career. It can translate into a good life.”