Speaker Bio

Trisha Rich is an attorney in Holland & Knight’s Chicago and New York offices, the national co-chair of the firm’s Legal Profession Team and a member of the Litigation and Dispute Resolution practice. Trisha also serves as the Professional Responsibility Partner for Holland & Knight’s Chicago office. Her practice focuses on legal ethics and professional responsibility matters and complex commercial litigation.

Trisha is a national leader in the legal ethics community. She founded and coordinates the Attorney Defense Initiative, the nation’s first privately sponsored pro bono initiative that focuses on assisting impaired lawyers facing disciplinary charges. Trisha is the immediate past president of the Association of Professional Responsibility Lawyers, the nation’s largest legal ethics bar organization, and she is a frequent speaker and author on a variety of issues related to ethics and risk management. She is currently an adjunct professor at New York University School of Law, where she teaches legal ethics and professional responsibility. She previously taught legal ethics at Northwestern University Pritzker School of Law and has been a guest lecturer at the University of Michigan Law School. Trisha is a member of the Ethics Commission of Metropolitan Water Reclamation District of Greater Chicago, which adjudicates ethics complaints involving the agency’s governmental officers and employees. Trisha is the author of Practical Ethics, the ethics column in the Chicago Bar Association’s publication, The Record. Trisha is the third author of the column in the history of the CBA, and its first woman author. She is also the co-editor of the sixth edition of Attorney Fee Agreements in Michigan, published by The Institute of Continuing Legal Education.

In her professional responsibility practice, Trisha advises lawyers, law firms, legal tech companies and in-house counsel on a variety of issues related to professional responsibility and legal ethics, along with risk management, including legal malpractice, partnership and corporate structuring, regulation, law firm management and employment issues, fee disputes, data breaches, conflicts and disqualification issues, confidentiality, privilege, attorney disciplinary defense, character and fitness proceedings, and all areas of legal ethics. Trisha also advises both law firms and lawyers on ethical and fiduciary issues related to lateral hiring, law firm dissolution and expulsion matters, and she serves as outside general counsel to law firms across the country. She has experience with law firm internal investigations, and also serves as an expert witness on legal ethics and professional responsibility matters, including partnership and fee disputes.

In her commercial litigation practice, Trisha represents a wide variety of clients in litigation and other disputes, including national and international companies, small businesses, municipalities and state agencies, and individuals. She has extensive experience in resolving disputes between businesses and represents clients at the trial and appellate levels in a wide variety of matters, including actions for breach of contract, tort claims, breach of warranty, fraud, consumer fraud, deceptive trade practices, tortious interference and all aspects of real estate, property management and receivership litigation. Trisha also has broad experience representing financial institutions in all types of litigation, including consumer financial litigation. Trisha also has experience serving as an arbitrator.

Trisha has first- and second-chaired many trials and evidentiary hearings in both state and federal courts, and in arbitrations, and has extensive experience representing clients in administrative hearings. She is a member of the Trial Bar for the Northern District of Illinois, has argued before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, is a 2012 graduate of the National Institute for Trial Advocacy’s (NITA) national trial practice program, was designated as a NITA Advocate in 2022, and was designated as a NITA Master Advocate in 2023.

Prior to practicing law, Trisha taught practical and theoretical ethics at two universities. She is a Commissioner at the Illinois Supreme Court Commission on Professionalism.