Renee Knake Jefferson

Renee Knake Jefferson holds the Joanne and Larry Doherty Chair in Legal Ethics at the University of Houston Law Center.  Prior to joining the University of Houston faculty in 2016, Jefferson held the Foster Swift Professorship of Legal Ethics and was co-director of the Frank J. Kelley Institute of Ethics and the Legal Profession at Michigan State University College of Law.

Before her academic career, Professor Jefferson practiced law at Mayer Brown in Chicago and Hunton & Williams in Richmond, Virginia, where she specialized in commercial litigation, telecommunications, and labor/employment law. She also worked as an assistant city attorney for Charlottesville, Virginia.

In 2015, Jefferson was a scholar-in-residence at Stanford Law School’s Center on the Legal Profession and a visiting scholar at the American Bar Foundation. In 2019, she held the Fulbright Distinguished Chair in Entrepreneurship and Innovation at Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology University in Australia.

She earned her JD from the University of Chicago Law School.