Kate Tuma is a partner at Squire Patton Boggs LLP. A trusted advisor to some of the world’s largest car companies, Tuma regularly advises their corporate strategy teams, helping them navigate regulatory compliance, policy, and geopolitical issues impacting the automotive industry and her clients’ global operations.

As an 18-year veteran of the firm and leader of the firm’s Automotive Industry Group, she brings a cross-practice, multidisciplinary perspective to every matter. Tuma frequently leverages the firm’s global network of legal professionals to deliver effective and efficient solutions tailored to her clients’ needs. She is also frequently called upon to identify critical resources and develop tailored solutions to meet automotive companies’ evolving needs. In addition to her transactional practice, she advises on multijurisdictional internal investigations, pre-dispute, and litigation matters, and works closely with the firm’s arbitration and trial teams on antitrust, complex commercial, distressed asset and project finance disputes. For over five years, she successfully defended one of the world’s leading packaged food companies in a global antitrust investigation and lawsuit. She also served as the interim director of litigation and associate general counsel for a publicly traded Japanese financial group from 2019 to 2020, further deepening her client-focused perspective and fully integrated, comprehensive approach to providing value added services.

Her global insights are rooted in nearly a decade spent as an associate and partner in the firm’s Tokyo and Seoul offices (2008-2017). Now based in Los Angeles, she is one of the few women leading a global law firm’s automotive industry group. She was recently named a 2024 Law Firm Visionary by the Los Angeles Times, and she and her team members are consistently recognized for excellence by Chambers, the Los Angeles Business Journal, and Legal 500 Asia Pacific.

Tuma serves on the National Advocates Council for Back On My Feet, an organization dedicated to empowering the unhoused formerly incarcerated, through fitness, education, and training. She is also a volunteer lawyer with LAFLA Domestic Violence Clinic at the Santa Monica Courthouse, and the Chicago Pro Bono Network’s Incarcerated Survivor’s Project.