Clara J. Shin

Clara Jihye Shin is a partner at Covington & Burling LLP and co-chair of the firm’s Commercial Litigation Practice Group. Clients call on Clara in the late stages of litigation to take matters to trial or reorient the strategic direction of a case. In the last few years, she obtained complete trial or arbitration wins valued at more than $2.5 billion, in each instance taking over from prior counsel and rebuilding the defense strategy.

Clara joined the National Women’s Law Center immediately after college as an intern working on combat exclusion laws for women in the military. She subsequently helped to design and launch the AmeriCorps national service program under President Bill Clinton. Clara also served as a White House Fellow and Special Assistant in the White House Office of the Chief of Staff. Her international experiences include working for the United States Agency for International Development in South Africa, where she assisted in developing a privately funded, lease-to-own public housing program and authored bilateral country agreements to establish economic policy and human rights programs, and participated in the creation of Tahoe-Baikal Institute, a binational environmental institute in California and Siberia.