Nicolaine Lazarre is an associate fellow at the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies. She is a seasoned executive with more than 20 years of experience at the intersection of law, social impact, and organizational transformation. Lazarre served as vice president of external affairs at Charter Communications. She was appointed to a federal advisory committee providing recommendations to the Federal Communications Commission on advancing equity in communications policy and digital access.

Prior, Lazarre served as general counsel and chief compliance officer at the Urban Resource Institute, the nation’s largest provider of domestic violence shelter services. As a member of the executive team, she led all legal affairs. She dedicated more than a decade to the National Urban League, where she served as general counsel and founded and scaled the organization’s legal department from the ground up. As lead negotiator of landmark civil rights MOUs with Fortune 50 communications firms, she secured commitments that unlocked millions of dollars in philanthropy, procurement, and employment opportunities for diverse-led nonprofits, legal and financial services professionals, and consumers in underserved communities.

She began her legal career at Weil, Gotshal & Manges LLP.

She has also served as an adjunct associate professor at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Nonprofit Management and is a longstanding board member of the Multicultural Media, Telecommunications and Internet Council.

She holds a J.D. from Georgetown University Law Center, where she served as a law clerk at the Institute for Public Representation, and a Bachelor of Science in political science from the University of Houston.