Former Chair of the Democratic National Committee and U.S. Secretary of Labor the Honorable Thomas Perez Joins Venable in Washington
Venable LLP is pleased to announce that Thomas E. Perez has joined the firm as a partner in the Washington, D.C., office. Perez previously served as the chair of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and as secretary of labor and assistant attorney general for civil rights under President Barack Obama.
As chair of the DNC, Perez oversaw the rebuilding of the organization’s infrastructure and implementation of vital reforms, enabling the party to secure critical victories at the local, state, and national levels. As labor secretary under President Obama, Perez was a member of the president’s economic team, led a top-to-bottom transformation of the agency, and worked closely with key Department of Labor (DOL) component agencies, including the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), Wage & Hour Division, and Employee Benefits Security Administration (EBSA). He forged meaningful partnerships between workers and businesses on a range of important issues and settled two major labor disputes – one involving port workers in the West Coast ports and the other involving 40,000 telecommunications workers.
Perez spent over a decade at the Justice Department during multiple administrations and multiple tours of duty, starting as a career civil rights prosecutor, deputy assistant attorney general for civil rights, and ultimately leading the division during the first term of the Obama administration. During his career at the Civil Rights Division, he prosecuted and supervised the prosecution of numerous high-profile civil rights cases and handled a wide range of important civil rights matters. As assistant attorney general for civil rights, he led an expansive effort to restore and transform civil rights enforcement in a wide array of areas, oversaw an active police reform practice, reached landmark settlements to change the culture of policing in numerous cities, and settled the three largest residential fair lending cases in the history of the Fair Housing Act.
Perez previously served as secretary of Maryland’s Department of Labor, Licensing and Regulation (DLLR) and led the effort to enact a sweeping package of state reforms to address the foreclosure crisis in Maryland. He was the first Latino elected to serve on Montgomery County Maryland’s County Council and served as council president in 2005. He also served as special counsel to Senator Edward Kennedy, and was Senator Kennedy’s principal advisor on civil rights, criminal justice, and constitutional issues. For the final two years of the Clinton administration, he served as the director of the Office for Civil Rights at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HSS).
Perez received his J.D. from Harvard Law School, his master’s in public policy from the Kennedy School of Government, and his A.B. in international relations and political science from Brown University.
