Tanya McVeigh

Her practice reflects the route she took into it.

She began in antitrust and trial practice at Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher, following a judicial clerkship with the Hon. Robert J. Kelleher of the United States District Court. She moved in-house at Hewlett-Packard, where her work covered complex litigation, acquisitions, insurance, and risk strategy.

She then stepped out of practice and into nonprofit leadership — as Chief Executive Officer and Executive Director of the San Francisco Zoological Society, and as Chair of the Board of the Janet Pomeroy Center. She has also served as President and Commissioner of the San Francisco Board of Appeals.

That sequence is the reason clients call her.

Most lawyers advising a nonprofit board have never sat on one. Most people who have run a nonprofit are not lawyers. The questions that arrive on an executive director’s desk are rarely purely legal ones — they are legal questions tangled up in funding, staff morale, board politics, and what the sector will say. Advice that ignores the second half of that is advice you cannot use.

She returned to practice to do this work specifically: to be the counsel she would have wanted on the other end of the phone.

Board and civic service

Chair of the Board, The Janet Pomeroy Center
Chief Executive Officer and Executive Director, San Francisco Zoological Society
Vice Chair, Board of Trustees, San Francisco Zoological Society
President and Commissioner, San Francisco Board of Appeals
Chief Compliance Officer and Executive Advisor, Monte Azul Center for the Arts