WHO WE ARE

Meet the team. 

 
Angella Bittencourt
Chief of Strategy and Impact

Angella Bittencourt is a trilingual technology lawyer, strategist, and people-centered leader with more than 25 years of experience advising organizations on emerging technology, intellectual property, data protection, compliance, corporate policy, and complex business issues.

Her career spans senior legal roles in the technology industry at Microsoft and Avanade. She works across legal, business, and technology teams and brings a cross-cultural perspective to decisions involving new technologies, organizational change, policy, and process. Her approach is practical and deeply human. She asks how a strategy works in the real world, who it affects, and what people need to understand, trust, and use it.

Angella brings extensive experience in collaboration, project management, policy and process development, communication, and cross-functional leadership. She is a trusted adviser who helps leaders work through complexity without losing sight of the people affected by their decisions. Her ability to connect business priorities, technology, and human needs shapes how she approaches both strategy and impact.

At Illuminating Wisdom, Angella serves as Chief of Strategy and Impact. She leads strategic growth, institutional partnerships, and business development and plays a central role in shaping how the firm's work reaches organizations, business owners, and communities.

Angella leads Illuminating Wisdom's nonprofit sector strategy and Legally Lucid's Concierge product. She shapes how the company serves nonprofit leaders and organizations and oversees the development of higher-touch experiences for business owners and nonprofit leaders who need education, structured support, and access to the right professionals at the right time. She also leads outreach and relationship development with accelerators, business organizations, nonprofits, foundations, and other institutional partners.

Her work in AI strategy draws on decades inside the technology industry. Angella helps organizations examine how AI affects people, policies, processes, and organizational trust. She brings particular attention to stakeholder impact, adoption, and the gap between a technology decision made at the top and the experience of the people expected to live with it.

For Angella, impact is not measured by how ambitious a strategy sounds. She focuses on whether the work reaches the people it is designed to serve, removes barriers, strengthens their ability to act, and creates results that can be sustained. That perspective is central to Illuminating Wisdom's approach to responsible AI, business protection, and organizational change.

Angella combines legal judgment, technology experience, empathy, and strategic discipline. At Illuminating Wisdom, she helps ensure that growth and impact remain connected as the company builds products, programs, and partnerships designed for real people and real organizations.

Angella Bittencourt
Trudy Armand
Trudy Armand
Chief AI Implementation and Automation Officer

Trudy-Ann Armand is an AI strategist, educator, entrepreneur, and learning technology leader who helps organizations turn AI strategy into systems, workflows, and training people can actually use.

Her career spans learning and development, enterprise technology, and business ownership. Trudy worked in learning and development at Baptist Health South Florida and later led enterprise learning solutions at Spirit Airlines. At Spirit, her work included learning technology, digital transformation, and involvement in the rollout of the airline's AI implementation program. That experience gave her a firsthand view of what it takes to introduce new technology inside complex organizations and help people adopt it in practice.

Trudy holds a Master of Science in Education focused on Training and Performance Improvement and brings deep experience in adult learning, instructional design, LMS implementation, and workforce education. She has spent years translating complex systems into learning experiences and processes that make sense to the people expected to use them.

She also spent more than a decade building and operating e-commerce businesses. Trudy is a graduate of the Goldman Sachs 10,000 Small Businesses program and the Amazon Black Business Accelerator and serves as a mentor in the Goldman Sachs small business ecosystem. As the founder of HER-MINE.AI, she builds AI-supported tools and teaches entrepreneurs and professionals how to improve workflows, automate repetitive work, and use AI to create new opportunities.

At Illuminating Wisdom, Trudy leads AI implementation, automation, and technology adoption. She helps substantively design the firm's AI education and advisory programs and plays a major role in teaching and delivering AI training to organizations and business owners.

Trudy also helps lead the substantive development of Legally Lucid, Illuminating Wisdom's business protection platform. She works closely with Marcia on product design and implementation, translates approved product logic and content into build-ready systems, and oversees the technical build with developers. Her role includes helping connect the Diagnostic, Business Protection Map, Readiness Report, and Vault into a usable product while building the automation and workflows needed to scale it.

Trudy brings an unusual combination of enterprise implementation experience, adult-learning expertise, entrepreneurship, and hands-on AI building. She understands both the technology and the human work required to make it useful.

Carol Green von Kaul
Chief Intellectual Property Strategy Officer

Carol Green von Kaul is a registered patent attorney, intellectual property strategist, trial lawyer, and educator with decades of experience helping businesses, inventors, and creators protect and understand the value of what they build.

Her intellectual property practice spans patents, trademarks, copyrights, licensing, commercialization, and disputes involving ownership and infringement. Carol brings both in-house and outside counsel experience, giving her a practical view of intellectual property from inside a business and as an adviser to clients navigating protection, growth, and conflict.

Carol also has substantial litigation and trial experience. Her work includes complex patent, trademark, and copyright matters. That experience shapes how she approaches intellectual property strategy. She understands how decisions about ownership, documentation, licensing, and use can become critical when relationships break down or a dispute arises.

Originally from Jamaica, Carol brings a global and cross-cultural perspective to her work. She has represented creators in matters where culture, creative expression, ownership, and commercial use collide, including serving on the legal team representing Jamaican reggae artist Flourgon in copyright litigation involving Miley Cyrus.

Carol's path to intellectual property law also includes a background in computer science and experience as an information technology systems analyst before law school. Her technical foundation informs her work with inventions, technology, and innovation and strengthens her ability to translate between creators, business owners, and complex intellectual property concepts.

An experienced educator and former adjunct professor at Miami Dade College, Carol makes intellectual property concepts easier to understand without stripping away their importance. She is also a past president of the Caribbean Bar Association and brings years of leadership and service to the legal profession.

At Legally Lucid, Carol leads intellectual property strategy, content, and education and develops practical resources that help business owners recognize where intellectual property appears in their businesses, understand the questions ownership and use can raise, and prepare for more informed conversations with intellectual property professionals.

Carol also leads intellectual property training and office hours for Legally Lucid users and partner communities. Her work addresses the places where intellectual property often becomes complicated, including business and product names, content, inventions, contractor-created work, licensing, third-party materials, and AI-assisted creation.

Carol brings the perspective of a registered patent attorney, trial lawyer, former in-house counsel, outside adviser, and educator to Legally Lucid. Her experience helps ensure that Legally Lucid's intellectual property resources reflect how ownership, protection, and use questions actually arise in businesses and give business owners a stronger foundation for recognizing those questions before they become more difficult and expensive to address.

Carol Green Vonkauls
Brooke Carr
Brooke Carr
Director of Operations

Brooke Carr is an operations strategist and systems architect who builds the infrastructure that lets founder-led organizations move quickly without losing track of their own work.

She is the founder of Dauntless Integrated Solutions, an operations consultancy serving executives across commercial real estate, consumer technology, design, and the nonprofit sector. Her career spans project management, operations leadership, and organizational scaling, most recently as Director of Marketing and Operations at AiCRE Partners, and earlier at Glowforge, Elemental Design, and Lasagna Love. At Glowforge she coordinated executive stakeholders and delivered early AI training to the company's leadership as they first began working with GPT.

Brooke has run her own project management and operations practice since 2019. She has built operational systems in ClickUp since 2021, deploying workspaces for organizations across several industries, and her work increasingly centers on AI workflow integration for teams.

At Illuminating Wisdom, Brooke serves as Director of Operations. She designed and built the workspace the firm runs on, from the project architecture through the team wiki and onboarding materials, and owns the operating cadence that keeps a distributed team of specialists coordinated across two brands. She leads platform and vendor evaluations, maintains the firm's competitive and business intelligence research, and manages Marcia's speaking, podcast, and media pipeline.

For Legally Lucid, Brooke owns the launch mechanics: partner and cohort target development, beta tester intake and feedback, usability review of the Diagnostic and the Business Protection Vault, and production tracking for Vault materials.

Brooke works from a simple premise: that most organizational friction is structural rather than personal, and that the durable fix is almost always a better system rather than more effort.

Illuminating Wisdom® LLC is an advisory, coaching, and education firm. Its services are not legal advice and do not create an attorney-client relationship. Where legal services are appropriate, they are provided separately through Lucid Law, P.A., subject to conflicts, scope, jurisdiction, and a separate engagement agreement.