About
Tanya McVeigh is an attorney in Sausalito, California.
She advises nonprofit organizations, foundations, and closely held businesses on governance, employment, and reputation matters.
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 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 a Commissioner on the San Francisco Board of Permit 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.
Education
- Juris Doctor, University of California College of the Law, San Francisco (formerly UC Hastings)
- American Jurisprudence Award, Criminal Law
- Undergraduate study at Smith College and the University of Southern California
Admission
- State Bar of California
Earlier practice
- Judicial Clerk, Hon. Robert J. Kelleher, United States District Court
- Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher — antitrust and trial practice
- Hewlett-Packard — in-house legal
Board and civic service
- Chair of the Board, The Janet Pomeroy Center
- Chief Executive and Executive Director, San Francisco Zoological Society
- Vice Chair, Board of Trustees, San Francisco Zoological Society
- Commissioner, San Francisco Board of Permit Appeals