Jacqueline
Ryall

Jacqueline Ryall is the General Counsel for the Clooney Foundation for Justice. For more than 30 years Jackie has advised clients in the non-profit and corporate sectors. Prior to joining CFJ, Jackie served as a Director of Legal at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation where she provided legal and strategic advice to its global operations and program teams and used her expertise in intellectual property rights and Global Access concepts to structure philanthropic investments to maximize charitable impact. While there, she also served as a program officer for the Gates Foundation’s Gender Equality Division’s Women in Leadership: Law grant portfolio, where she worked with grantees to analyze cultural and legal obstacles that obstruct diversity and women’s equality in sub-Saharan Africa. Prior to her work at Gates, Jackie served as Associate General Counsel for Corbis Corporation, an international visual media and rights clearance company and practiced as an intellectual property attorney at K&L Gates LLP and Finnegan, Henderson, Farabow, Garrett & Dunner LLP.

Following law school, Jackie served as an attorney/advisor at the U.S. Department of Justice as part of the Attorney General’s Honors Program and as an adjunct professor at American University’s Washington College of Law. In 1996, she volunteered at a youth center in Travnik, Bosnia-Herzegovina as part of a project coordinated by the UN High Commissioner for Refugees and the United Methodist Committee on Relief following the Bosnian war.

In addition to her work at CFJ, Jackie co-founded and currently sits on the board of directors for SMASH, a public charity dedicated to providing working musicians in Washington state with access to free and subsidized healthcare, including hearing services, mental healthcare, and dental services. She has a bachelor’s degree with honors from The Catholic University of America and a J.D. from the Georgetown University Law Center.