Tynia Richard

After graduating Washington University in St. Louis with a degree in Business and concentration in Finance, Ms. Richard moved to New York City to work in banking at Manufacturers Hanover Trust Company. She soon shifted focus and entered Harvard Law School, later returning to NYC for a legal career that she imagined would focus on the public interest. That turned into a career in government — in New York State and New York City. 

As an Assistant Attorney General in the Civil Rights and Charities Bureaus of the New York State Attorney General’s Office, she investigated and litigated cases that included predatory lending, stop & frisk in NYC, ADA access to polling sites, and charities fraud.

She joined city government to work at the Office of Administrative Trials and Hearings (OATH), the City’s central tribunal, for 12 years presiding as an Administrative Law Judge in hundreds of trials of employment matters involving discrimination under city human rights law, employee discipline, police authority to seize vehicles as instrumentality of crime, and other matters under city and state law.  

She also served as General Counsel and Deputy Commissioner at OATH and, briefly, as Acting Commissioner and Chief Administrative Law Judge.

Ms. Richard is the recent past General Counsel and Deputy Commissioner at New York City’s Office of Technology and Innovation (OTI). As General Counsel, she supervised a staff of attorneys that specialize in negotiating the city’s largest technology and cybersecurity contracts, advise the NYC Cyber Command, negotiate, and draft telecommunications franchise agreements, and engage in general litigation and dispute resolution involving employment, tort, and contract law. 

Prior to government service, she was an Associate at Cooper Liebowitz Royster & Wright, a commercial litigation firm, and Senior Staff Attorney at Planned Parenthood Federation conducting litigation nationwide in support of women’s right to abortion and contraception.  She is honored to have clerked for the Honorable Constance Baker Motley in the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York.