Kaniah Konkoly-Thege planned for a very different career than the one she ended up building. A liberal arts major, Kaniah studied international relations and Spanish specifically to avoid calculus. Now, she’s now the Chief Legal Officer at a quantum computing company.
That gap between what you expect and where you end up has become a theme of Kaniah’s career. From her work on the landmark Cobell settlement case to Capitol Hill briefings on quantum export controls, Kaniah has made a career of walking headfirst into the hardest problems and figuring it out along the way.
Kaniah was born on the Pima reservation in Arizona and began her law career at the Department of the Interior. In conversation with GC AI founder Cecilia Ziniti, Kaniah shares how her unique background shaped how she views her work, her advice for building technical fluency from scratch, and why the lawyers who thrive in tech are those who are willing to look stupid.
The Cobell Case: Learning Cybersecurity On the Job
In December 2002, a federal judge ordered the entire Department of the Interior to disconnect from the internet. Yes, the entire department.
Employees were instructed to come into the office on a Friday afternoon and physically unplug the Ethernet cables from their computers. The reason? The department had been found to be mismanaging the individual Indian money accounts it held in trust for Native people, accounts stretching back to 1887, and the judge had seen enough (Cobell v. Salazar).
Kaniah joined the Department as a junior attorney shortly after. The senior lawyers on the case wanted nothing to do with it, and the Secretary of the Interior had already been held in contempt twice. So on Kaniah’s second day on the job, she was asked to meet with the Secretary and figure out a reconnection plan for every bureau and office in the department.
“They asked me to figure out this crazy cybersecurity stuff and help the department of justice present to the Special Master in the case,” Kaniah said. “So I had to essentially figure out what would be considered an appropriate reconnection plan that included segregation of data and mapping out network architecture and stuff like that, which I had no clue about. I just started figuring it out.”
She spent weeks in crash-course sessions with personnel from NIST and the NSA, asking every basic question she could think of until the technical framework clicked well enough to translate into legal terms. Kaniah knew she needed to be able to stand in front of a special master and defend a plan she understood.
The Cobell case meant a lot to her personally as well. Kaniah is an enrolled member of the Osage Nation and grew up on reservations across Arizona, Florida, Mississippi, and New Mexico. Working on a federal accounting of assets the government had mismanaged for over a century, assets belonging to Native people like her, was simultaneously educational and complicated.
“Working on this case was a challenge because I was learning more and more about the kind of institutional racism that had been put in place over the last few centuries that led the Department to where it was today,” Kaniah said. “But reconnecting with Native people, people who look like me, that had the life experience that I had, was really meaningful.”
Ask Stupid Questions, Tackle Hard Problems
Kaniah learned two very important lessons during the Cobell case. The first is to ask the experts all of your “stupid” questions. She learned that the people who knew the most were often the most willing to explain it, as long as you showed up with genuine curiosity.
The second lesson Kaniah learned was to volunteer for the hard stuff. Big law teaches you precision, but difficult problems give the ability to look at a situation and know intuitively what's likely to matter and what isn't.
The key to doing both well? Ask for what you want. At her first job, Big Law job, Kaniah noticed her colleague had two monitors. She had never asked for a second screen because she assumed it wasn't available. Don’t wait for someone else to get what you want because you were too nervous to ask for it.
Note from CZ: There's a Spanish expression I love: el no ya lo tienes. “If you don’t ask, you already have your no.” I’ve learned that lesson many times in my career.
Taking Quantum Computing to Capitol Hill
In late 2018, Honeywell was preparing to announce that it had been quietly building a quantum computer. The announcement was a big deal for the industry. The computer wasn’t created by scientists in a lab, it was built by engineers at a tech company. But as Honeywell was getting ready to go public, the US government was moving in a direction that might have killed the industry on the spot.
Regulators were pushing for strict export controls on quantum technology, with little understanding of what they were restricting or what it would cost. The supply chain that supported quantum hardware, including specialty lasers, dilution refrigerators, and precision components, was dependent on a handful of small overseas manufacturers. Licensing requirements built for large defense contractors would have been a death sentence for mom and pop shops in Europe that had never before navigated US export law.
Someone needed to translate quantum computing for regulators and ensure that American companies could still do business with their overseas suppliers.
“There was such a small group of people who understood the technology and they were all scientists, meaning they didn't really understand public policy,” Kaniah said. “So I started meeting with the regulators and going up to Capitol Hill and talking to Congress members to try and just get them to understand.”
How to Translate Quantum to Regulators
Since then, Kaniah has spent a lot of time explaining quantum computing to Congress members, regulators, and lawyers who thought they'd never need to understand advanced physics. Her secret? Come armed with plenty of analogies.
For example, imagine using computing to efficiently plan a seating chart for a wedding with a hundred guests and ten tables. Seems simple enough, right?
“A typical computer is not going to be able to solve it,” Kaniah said. “It'll take 10,000 years because it has to work through every iteration of where those people could sit. A quantum computer works more like a human brain, eliminating whole categories of bad options simultaneously to arrive at the optimal answer.”
Another good example of how quantum computing works is a little simpler: imagine a hundred hotel rooms with treasure in one of them. A classical computer would knock on every door to look for the treasure, while a quantum computer would simply open all of the doors at once.
The practical translation for in-house attorneys is this: quantum computing works on a scale we cannot currently fathom. It will eventually be able to break public key encryption, which is the backbone of virtually every secure digital transaction. It will reshape drug discovery, financial modeling, and chemistry, and in-house lawyers need to be prepared for this shift.
And because so few people in government really understand quantum or its future implications, attorneys like Kaniah are often doing the translating.
Innovating Creatively and Compliantly
A piece of advice Kaniah received from her mentor at Honeywell is the one she still leads with: “don't be the office of no.” Your job as GC isn't to find reasons something can't happen, it's to figure out how to get the business where it wants to go, compliantly and creatively.
In practice, that means standing alongside the BD team from the beginning, instead of parachuting in at the contract stage. She recommends getting involved in structuring deals early, building relationships with the other parties, and writing the agreement in a way that actually serves everyone at the table.
"I like to think of myself as a business partner first," Kaniah says.
Like her advice on preparing for the implications of quantum computing early, Kaniah recommends in-house attorneys take full advantage of legal automation tools like GC AI.
"I cannot tell you how much it has revolutionized my law department,” she said. “I've contracted hiring, and I've streamlined how we use outside counsel."
Her five-year prediction for the legal field is this: every lawyer will be using some version of legal AI, whether they're ready or not. The fear and uncertainty around training data and confidentiality are real, but companies like GC AI are building with security in mind. That means no model training with your data, data isolation, and encryption at rest with AES-256 and in transit via TLS.
Ready to try out the best legal AI on the market? Request a custom demo to learn how much time your team could be saving with GC AI.
