Presidents' Council
Debra Snider is an author, speaker, and mentor who currently serves as an advisor to several organizations that provide resources, services, and education with the goal of empowering women. She is also a coach and mentor to individuals in the corporate, professional services, and nonprofit arenas. Since her retirement from a distinguished business and legal career, Debra has authored four books (two business books and two novels) as well as numerous essays and articles, and given keynote speeches to audiences in the United States and Europe on a variety of topics, including strategic productivity, change facilitation, leadership, and success strategies for professional and business women. She has also consulted on these topics for corporate, legal services, academic, and nonprofit clients.
During her business career, Debra served as Executive Vice President, General Counsel, and Chief Administrative Officer at a $2 billion publicly held financial services company. In these roles, she had senior management responsibility for approximately 100 people and $100 million in annual expenditures and led the transformation of her units from cost centers to true strategic assets for the company. Productivity, employee job satisfaction, customer satisfaction, enterprise risk management, and operating efficiency were all significantly enhanced. Before that, she was a partner at a large Chicago-based law firm, where she practiced primarily in the securities, securitization, and mergers & acquisitions areas; in addition to her law practice, she chaired the Securities Department, was Co-Hiring Partner, and co-founded a women’s forum comprising over 750 Chicago-area professional and business women.
Debra is a 1976 Phi Beta Kappa graduate of the University of Michigan and a 1979 graduate of the University of Chicago Law School. A Chicagoan until 2005, she now lives in Nevada.