Tina Tchen

Tina Tchen heads Buckley Sandler’s Chicago office, and draws on more than 30 years of experience at the highest levels of private practice and government service. She provides corporations, boards of directors, and individuals with unique litigation, counseling, and crisis management skills.

Over the course of her extensive career, Ms. Tchen has handled complex civil litigation and enforcement matters in both state and federal courts in Illinois and across the country. She has represented major global corporations and their officers and directors in a wide range of matters, including consumer class actions, corporate investigations, government enforcement actions, executive compensation, and breach of contract litigation.

Ms. Tchen also has represented public agencies in state and federal class actions, and successfully argued before the United States Supreme Court on behalf of the State of Illinois.

Ms. Tchen previously served as an Assistant to President Obama, Executive Director of the White House Council on Women and Girls, and Chief of Staff to First Lady Michelle Obama. In addition, she worked on Title IX initiatives and was instrumental in the formation of the White House Task Force to Protect Students from Sexual Assault.

Ms. Tchen is a leading voice in the national conversation on fighting sexual misconduct, gender inequity, and discrimination, and has addressed these issues at Forbes’ I.D.E.A. Summit, the Wall Street Journal’s Future of Everything Festival, Vanity Fair’s Founder’s Fair, and the Milken Institute’s Global Conference, and at a number of other notable venues.

She has also been instrumental in spearheading the Time’s Up movement’s Legal Defense Fund, which provides legal support to women and men who have experienced sexual harassment in the workplace.

Ms. Tchen is a leader of Buckley Sandler’s Workplace Cultural Compliance Practice, counseling companies on issues related to gender inequity, sexual harassment, and lack of diversity in the workplace. She guides companies in approaching cultural compliance issues with the same rigor and vigilance — and the same compliance-management systems and controls — that they devote to other critical risks. Ms. Tchen’s work in this area includes:

• Developing, implementing, and evaluating compliance-management systems (CMS) to address a broad range of issues, including sexual harassment, gender inequity, diversity, and inclusion
• Designing, implementing, and evaluating board-level and business-line compliance policies and procedures to drive cultural change and measure progress
• Constructing best practices for corporate diversity and inclusion initiatives
• Conducting enterprise-wide compliance risk assessments and gap analyses
• Conducting internal investigations in response to internal complaints or external inquiries

Ms. Tchen has received a variety of awards in recognition of her work, including the Leadership Award from the Women’s Bar Association of Illinois, the “Women of Achievement” award from the Anti-Defamation League, and was named Chicago Lawyer’s “Person of the Year.”

She has also been recognized as a Business Leader of Color by Chicago United. In 2018, she received the “Margaret Brent Women Lawyers of Achievement” award from the American Bar Association, the “Myra Bradwell Woman of Achievement” award from the Women’s Bar Association of Illinois, and was recognized by Legal 500 in the Corporate Investigations and White-Collar Criminal Defense practice area.

Ms. Tchen serves on numerous strategic advisory boards for organizations, businesses, and nonprofits, including the U.S. Afghan Women’s Council, Quantum Leaps, Inc., Civic Nation, the United State of Women, Women in the Service Change Initiative, and Gender Equity is Common Sense.

Prior to joining the Obama administration, Ms. Tchen was a partner in corporate litigation at Skadden, where she practiced for 23 years. She received her J.D. from Northwestern University School of Law and her B.A. from Harvard University, where she was a member of Phi Beta Kappa and an editor of The Harvard Independent.