Jessica Collins

Chief Legal Officer athenahealth

Last Reviewed: September 19, 2026

Executive Summary

Jessica Collins is Chief Legal Officer of athenahealth, where she runs the combined Legal, Compliance and Government Affairs function. athenahealth builds the electronic health record, revenue cycle and patient engagement software that a large share of American ambulatory medical practices run on, which puts her legal remit at an awkward intersection: clinical data privacy, healthcare reimbursement rules, federal certification requirements and ordinary commercial contracting, all at once, at a company that is no longer publicly traded but is owned by two of the largest private equity firms in the world. She joined in September 2016, became General Counsel in August 2017 and took the Chief Legal Officer title in 2024. What is distinctive is less her trajectory — private practice partner to in-house counsel to general counsel is a well-worn path — than her stated model for the function: lawyers embedded in business teams from the start of product planning, on the theory that a legal department consulted early is cheaper than one consulted late.

Career Highlights

• Promoted to Chief Legal Officer of athenahealth in 2024, having been the company’s General Counsel since August 2017.
• Oversees Legal, Compliance and Government Affairs as a single function, rather than legal alone — a scope that includes the company’s regulatory and public policy exposure.
• Has been at athenahealth across the whole of its private-ownership era, joining in September 2016 and serving through the company’s 2019 take-private and its $17 billion acquisition by Bain Capital and Hellman & Friedman in February 2022.
• Made partner in the Corporate Group at Brown Rudnick LLP, concentrating on business and securities law, before going in-house.
• Held senior in-house roles at two large and very differently regulated companies before athenahealth: Vice President and Associate General Counsel at Keurig Green Mountain, and Senior Counsel at Raytheon.
• Restructured how legal works at athenahealth by placing legal representatives inside other departments and into product development planning from the initial stages, with the explicit aim of being part of the thought process rather than the say-no process later on.
• Created ‘LegalEase’, an internal channel through which colleagues can get legal questions answered directly.
• Articulates the job in terms of listening rather than advising — her stated view is that to be a good lawyer you have to listen more than you talk.

Professional Journey

Collins grew up around medicine without entering it. Her father was a physician who worked long hours and took calls late into the night; she has said she decided not to follow him into clinical practice, and instead found a way to support healthcare providers through legal work. That is a neat account in retrospect, but the first two decades of her career were not in healthcare at all.

She began in private practice in Boston — secondary sources report a start at Testa, Hurwitz & Thibeault, though this is not independently confirmed — and rose to partner in the Corporate Group at Brown Rudnick LLP, where she practised business and securities law. From there she moved in-house, first as Senior Counsel at Raytheon, the defence contractor, and then as Vice President and Associate General Counsel at Keurig Green Mountain, the beverage company. Defence and consumer packaged goods are about as far apart as two in-house legal environments get, and the combination gave her regulated-industry compliance work alongside high-volume commercial contracting.

She joined athenahealth in September 2016 and was appointed General Counsel in August 2017. By the time she was profiled in 2018 she had already begun reshaping the function around embedded lawyers: legal representatives sitting within other departments, participating in product planning from the outset, and an internal resource called LegalEase for routine questions. Her argument was that a legal team brought in at the end of a process can only block, whereas one present at the beginning can shape.

The company changed around her considerably during that tenure. athenahealth was taken private in 2019, ending a twelve-year run as a NASDAQ-listed company, and in February 2022 was acquired by Bain Capital and Hellman & Friedman for $17 billion. It is headquartered in Boston and led by chairman and chief executive Bob Segert. In 2024 Collins was elevated to Chief Legal Officer, with Legal, Compliance and Government Affairs reporting to her.

Outside the company she serves as a Director of Spark Kindness, a Massachusetts non-profit running community and family programmes, and lives in Natick with her family.

Education

Northeastern University School of Law

J.D.

Bates College

B.A., English, with Honors