Lakshmi Sarma Ramani leads the Firm’s Exempt Organizations, Education & Social Impact practice and serves as Outside GC’s Director of Compliance and Ethics.

Lakshmi brings more than 25 years of significant transactional experience as both a senior legal executive and private practitioner, representing a wide range of for-profit and nonprofit companies.

She regularly handles a full range of legal matters, including:

• Strategic and tactical advice and counsel
• Cross-border transactions and operational risk analysis
• Negotiating and drafting commercial contracts, IP licensing, and SaaS agreements
• Employment and labor-related matters
• Student privacy and Educational Service Provider support
• Nonprofit corporate governance and board support and training
• Data privacy, cybersecurity, and data breaches
• Advertising, marketing, and prize promotions
• Strategic and crisis communications advice
• Exempt organization financial, audit, and investment support
• Agreements and MOUs with NGOs, federal, state, and local government agencies, universities, and school districts
• Global outside counsel network and management
• Support for conferences and events
• Nonprofit fundraising and sponsorships
• Publishing agreements
• Talent and influencer agreements
• Certification and accreditation issues

Lakshmi’s clients appreciate her ability to deliver practical legal advice in a clear and understandable way. She helps them reach their business goals while appropriately understanding and assessing potential risks.

Before joining Outside GC, Lakshmi served as General Counsel and Assistant Secretary at the National Association for the Education of Young Children (NAEYC), the largest early childhood professional association and the largest early childhood program and higher education degree accrediting organization in the U.S., where she was responsible for all legal, compliance, governance, and privacy matters.

Prior to NAEYC, Lakshmi served as the worldwide lead attorney for the marketing, membership, philanthropy, information technology, finance, and governance functions at The Nature Conservancy, the world’s largest NGO environmental organization.

Lakshmi began her legal career as an attorney with the Pennsylvania Office of General Counsel, assigned to the Pennsylvania Department of Revenue, where she advised on personal income tax, sales and use tax, and realty transfer tax matters. She also practiced public finance and tax law with the Rhode Island law firm Tillinghast Licht LLP, representing municipalities, state agencies, hospital systems, and universities in multimillion-dollar tax-exempt bond transactions and advising nonprofit organizations. Lakshmi also worked in-house at Sprint Nextel, where she negotiated FCC spectrum leases and supported the reconfiguration of public safety spectrum bandwidth after 9/11.

Lakshmi is active in community affairs, writing the Nonprofit Knowledge column for the Association of Corporate Counsel’s Docket magazine and serving as Trustee and Board Secretary of The Key School, an independent K-12 school. She also helps others in her community find resources to care for their elderly parents with dignity, and is a trained home dialysis and Lewy body dementia caregiver.

Lakshmi holds a B.A. in English (focused on African American Women’s Literature) from Clark University and a J.D. from the Temple University Beasley School of Law, where she was Managing Editor of the Temple International and Comparative Law Journal. She is a graduate of The Mercersburg Academy.

Lakshmi lives in Maryland with her husband, two teenage daughters, and two mischievous Bedlington terrier rescue dogs, Naveen and Tiana. When not helping her clients, she enjoys cooking a variety of vegetarian cuisines and gardening, and loves dusting off her college a cappella skills to sing karaoke with her family. Most of all, though, she and her husband spend their time at horse barns, karate studios and Indian classical dance performances with their children.