Ruchi Desai

Ruchi Desai is a strategic business leader, legal professional and educator. She has over 10 years of professional experience in finance, law, strategy, and operations. She has held leadership positions at dynamic start-ups, philanthropic organizations, and mature companies. Desai is uniquely skilled at growing talented teams, creating cross-functional synergies, building companies with efficient infrastructure and fostering collaborative, high-achieving cultures. 

Desai is the vice president of strategy and general counsel at interface rehab, inc., one of the largest rehab services providers in California. In her current role she leads strategic initiatives, including new business development and M&A, compliance and litigation. In Q4 2018, interface doubled the facilities it served and headcount. Desai also serves as an independent consultant helping companies scale quickly and enter new markets. At Ruggable, she oversaw the company’s growth from 130 to 500 employees and build of a new manufacturing plant in Chicago. She currently provides legal counsel and review of SAAS and vendor agreements at Business Insider and teaches courses on business and contract drafting at the University of Southern California’s Gould School of Law.

Previously, Desai co-founded an IoT start-up building a smart jewelry product grounded in the enduring connections between people, their own selves and the world around them. She has practiced as an intellectual property attorney for two years and is barred in both New York and California. Prior to her legal career, Desai spent two years trading credit default swaps at a market-neutral fund based out of New York.

Desai holds an LLM, specializing in intellectual property, from the London School of Economics and Political Science, a JD from Harvard Law School and bachelor’s degrees in finance and international studies from, respectively, the Wharton School and the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Pennsylvania.

FACULTY IN THE NEWS

The New Yorker
September 21, 2020
Re: Franita Tolson

Franita Tolson was quoted in the New Yorker about the legal challenges likely to follow the 2020 presidential election. “You will still see many claims that absentee ballots have been wrongly rejected, and those will lead to court cases," Tolson said. "The fact that we are generating lots of voting by mail will generate a lot of litigation.”

RECENT SCHOLARSHIP

Jonathan Barnett
July, 2020

"Lessons from Luckin Coffee: The Underappreciated Risks of Variable Interest Entities," Columbia Law School Blue Sky Blog, July 28, 2020.

Jonathan Barnett
July, 2020

"Big is not necessarily bad," The Hill, July 30, 2020.

Edward McCaffery
July, 2020

“The Death of the Income Tax (or, The Rise of America's Universal Wage Tax),” Indiana Law Journal  95 (2020): 1233.