Jane Flanagan

Leadership in Government Fellow, Open Society Foundations and Visiting Scholar, IIT Chicago-Kent School of Law

Jane Flanagan is a Leadership in Government Fellow with the Open Society Foundations and a Visiting Scholar at IIT Chicago-Kent School of Law. Flanagan is the former chief of the Workplace Rights Bureau within the Illinois Attorney General’s Office, a bureau she founded and led from November 2015 through December 2018. Under her leadership, the bureau brought national attention to the increasing use of illegal non-compete agreements for low-wage workers and negotiated settlements to release thousands of such workers nationwide from those agreements. She also served as labor counsel in the attorney general’s office. Previously, Flanagan was an assistant attorney general in Maryland, where she served as counsel to Maryland’s Division of Labor and Industry. She began her career litigating wage and hour collective action cases on behalf of employees. Flanagan earned a B.A. with honors from Wesleyan University and a J.D. from Northeastern University School of Law.