Sheila Warren has extensive experience advising in the philanthropic sector. She has counseled hundreds of charitable organizations, including public charities, private foundations, social welfare organizations, business leagues, churches, and schools, in the areas of tax and corporate law.
Ms. Warren received her A.B. with honors from Harvard College and her J.D. from Harvard Law School, where she worked with Professor Lani Guinier and served on the Boards of the Harvard Mediation Program, the Harvard South Asian Law Students' Association, and the Harvard Children and Family Rights Project. She began her career at Cravath, Swaine, & Moore LLP in Manhattan, where she was trained as a tax lawyer and began her work with nonprofits. She then moved to San Francisco to focus her practice exclusively on nonprofit organizations, first with Silk, Adler & Colvin and then with Coblentz, Patch, Duffy & Bass LLP, where she expanded her practice to include clients focused on social enterprise.
Ms. Warren is an Adjunct Professor at the Golden Gate University Law School, teaching "Tax Exempt Organizations" in the LLM program. She co-authored "Lobbying Clauses in Grant Agreements with Organizational Grantees," published in the March-April 2006 edition of Taxation of Exempts, and she is currently authoring a piece on international grantmaking and co-authoring a piece on nonprofit legal compliance, which will be published in the ABA Business Law Journal.
Ms. Warren has served as a guest speaker for myriad organizations on the topics of nonprofit law and diversity issues. She is a member of the Taxation and Business Law Sections of the American Bar Association, the Taxation Section of both the California State Bar and the Bar Association of San Francisco, and the South Asian Bar Association. She is admitted to practice in the states of California and New York.
Ms. Warren is extremely active in both the local and national philanthropic community, serving on the Boards of the San Francisco Symphonix League, the National Family Planning and Reproductive Health Association, and the Sister City Thessaloniki-San Francisco Committee. She also serves on the Minority Scholarships Committee of the Bar Association of San Francisco (BASF) and is the Chair of the Diversity Committee of the Barristers Club of BASF.