A former federal prosecutor, law director for the City of Cleveland, and large-firm litigator, Subodh Chandra is The Chandra Law Firm LLC’s founding and managing partner. His practice focuses on high-profile civil-rights litigation, along with white-collar-criminal defense and internal investigations.

Chandra is engaged for high-stakes litigation when reputations are on the line. His matters often have a crisis-communications, public-policy dimension. Examples include the police-shooting death of 12-year-old Tamir Rice by Cleveland police—a key moment in the Black Lives Matter movement nationally resulting in a $6,000,000 settlement, the nearly $1,000,000 in settlements for 2016 Republican National Convention protestors, voting-rights litigation against various voter-suppression schemes by the Ohio Secretary of State, and the retaliation suit over sexual-harassment allegations that resulted in the resignation of Case Western Reserve University’s law-school dean.

Before founding the firm, Chandra served as director of law for the city of Cleveland, a billion-dollar corporation. Chandra led the work of an 82-lawyer department with both criminal and civil divisions. He also sometimes served as Cleveland’s acting mayor.

Chandra is a graduate of the Yale Law School, where he was executive editor of the Yale Law & Policy Review. He also graduated with honors and distinction from Stanford University, which awarded him the John Gardner Fellowship to work as a protégé of Ohio Governor Richard F. Celeste.

Nicole Phillips is legal director of Haitian Bridge Alliance, a nonprofit community organization that advocates for fair and humane immigration policies and connects migrants with humanitarian, legal, and social services, with a particular focus on Black migrants, the Haitian community, women, LGBTQ+ individuals and survivors of torture and other human rights abuses. She is also an adjunct professor at UC College of the Law, San Francisco, where she co-teaches Human Rights and Rule of Law in Haiti. Ms. Phillips has been certified as an expert witness on country conditions in Haiti in dozens of U.S. immigration cases and has appeared before the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights and several United Nations human rights bodies on a variety of issues. Based in Port-au-Prince, Haiti from 2010 to 2018, Ms. Phillips worked on high profile human rights litigation and advocacy campaigns as a staff attorney with the Institute for Justice & Democracy in Haiti (“IJDH”). Ms. Phillips regularly provides legal and human rights analysis to U.S. and international media.