Janell Byrd-Chichester is Interim General Counsel at NFHA. With a more than 30-year career as a civil rights litigator and authority on public policy, Byrd-Chichester served as the inaugural Director of the Thurgood Marshall Institute of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc. (LDF). She also previously served as Chief of Staff of the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA). Prior to her role at FHFA, she was a partner at the Washington, DC law firm Mehri & Skalet, where she started a flourishing fair housing and fair lending practice. She also previously served as Co-Managing Attorney at The Cochran Firm’s Washington DC Office, where she litigated police misconduct, public accommodations, and employment discrimination cases and served as a public policy consultant to civil rights organizations on a broad array of issues. For more than ten years, she litigated school desegregation and higher education affirmative action cases at the NAACP Legal Defense Fund.