Joseph Portera
Business Chief Risk OfficerCapital One Financial Services
Joseph C. Portera currently serves as the Business Chief Risk Officer for Capital One Financial Services and sits on the Financial Services Senior Leadership Team. He reports directly to the President of Financial Services, who sits on the firm’s Executive Committee and reports to the CEO. Joseph manages a large team across multiple job families, including Risk Management, and Process Management. In this role, Joseph is responsible for overseeing all aspects of risk management as part of the first line of defense.
Before becoming the head of risk, Joseph served as Chief Legal Counsel for Financial Services. In this role, Joseph was responsible for providing strategic legal guidance to the Senior Management Team of the Financial Services business and to the President of Financial Services. This included building and managing a team responsible for analyzing laws and regulations applicable to the business and advising management of significant decisions, legislation, regulations and rulings currently and potentially affecting the company. Joseph was frequently called upon to assist senior executives in the Financial Services division in making informed and balanced decisions that impacted the overall strategic direction of the division and the company as a whole.
Joseph joined Capital One from Susman Godfrey LLP, a national, complex commercial litigation boutique recognized by Vault as the No. 1 boutique litigation law firm in the United States. At Susman Godfrey LLP, Joseph rapidly advanced to become one of the firm’s youngest equity partners, and was highly successful in trial practice and in business generation. Joseph represented a highly diverse range of clients and interests, including major financial services institutions, mortgage insurers, bond insurers, investment advisors, financial guaranty insurers, inventors, high-end art dealers, oil companies, national retail stories, and technology companies. Joseph has represented (and been adverse to) some of the nation’s largest and most successful companies in highly complex and high-value cases, and recovered hundreds of millions of dollars on behalf of his clients.
Prior to joining Susman Godfrey LLP, Joseph served as a federal judicial law clerk for the Honorable Sidney A. Fitzwater in the United States District Court for the Northern District of Texas.
Joseph graduated magna cum laude from Colgate University with his B.A. in English Literature, where he was a member of Phi Beta Kappa. Upon graduation, Joseph worked as an editorial assistant and writer for Red Herring and Wired magazines in San Francisco.
Joseph went on to receive his J.D. from the University of Texas School of Law with high honors, where he was also a member of the Order of the Coif and the Texas Law Review. During his undergraduate and graduate education, Joseph studied Russian Language at Oxford University in Oxford, England and international law and jurisprudence at the Università degli Studi di Siena in Siena, Italy.
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