Four years after Tracy-Elizabeth Clay landed a sought-after associate position at Hogan Lovells (then Hogan & Hartson), she was already weighing her employment options. The Harvard Law School graduate was on a partnership track and had plenty of mentors at the firm, but she didn’t feel passionate about the work. Clay says she knew it was time to move on when, asked to describe her best day at the office, she drew an absolute blank. "I couldn’t describe what made one day better than another," recalls Clay.
In 2002 she took a nonlegal government relations position with Teach for America. Clay became the nonprofit’s first general counsel in 2006 and now leads a department of five lawyers. Partly because of the sluggish economy in recent years, program application levels are continuing to rise. TFA has an annual budget of $300 million and is able to place and train new teachers in 47 different communities nationwide.
