Following private practice in Washington, D.C., Bansal worked in the Clinton Administration from 1993 to 1996 as a Counselor in the
U.S. Department of Justice and as a White House Special Counsel. At the
Justice Department, she assisted
Joel Klein, Assistant Attorney General for the Antitrust Division, on
United States v. Microsoft and other matters. In 1999, newly elected New York State Attorney General
Eliot Spitzer recruited her to serve in his office as Solicitor General of the State of New York, the statutory ranking officer after the Attorney General. In that capacity, she was in charge of the office's appellate activities, supervising 45 lawyers in the Solicitor General's Office who filed 40 to 50 appellate briefs each week, and she also helped manage the significant legal positions and amicus strategy of the 600 lawyers in the Attorney General's Office. Bansal won the "Best United States Supreme Court Brief" award from the
National Association of Attorneys General during every year that she served as New York Solicitor General, and is widely credited with initiating significant managerial reforms to enhance the legal excellence, efficiency and transparency of the Solicitor General's Office and with providing the intellectual underpinning of "federalism" that later animated Attorney General Spitzer's active state enforcement agenda. Bansal returned to Nebraska and taught Constitutional Law, Federalism, and a seminar on "Courts, Politics and Legal/Social Change: Evaluating the Limits and Successes of Rights-Based Approaches" as a visiting professor at the
University of Nebraska College of Law from 2002-2003. She was a visiting fellow at Harvard's
John F. Kennedy School of Government in 2003. Senate Minority Leader
Tom Daschle chose Bansal for the bipartisan
United States Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) in 2003, at which time she also rejoined private law practice in New York at Skadden, Arps. As a partner at
Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom, Bansal led the firm's appellate litigation and complex legal issues practice. In a "Public Lives" profile of her in 1999, the
New York Times referred to her as a "legal superstar." She has appeared as a commentator on legal issues and U.S. Supreme Court matters on CNN, C-SPAN and PBS news programs. She was mentioned as a possible
Solicitor General in the
Barack Obama Administration before
Harvard Law School Dean
Elena Kagan was announced as Obama's selection for the post. On January 19, 2009, the
Obama transition announced that Bansal had been chosen to serve at the
Office of Management and Budget as General Counsel and Senior Policy Adviser. In 2011,
The National Law Journal reported that Bansal would be stepping down as general counsel of OMB. Following her departure from government, President Obama appointed her as a public, nongovernmental member of the governing Council of the
Administrative Conference of the United States, a public-private partnership designed to make government work better. Bansal is a Henry Crown Fellow at the Aspen Institute and a Member of the Council on Foreign Relations. She received the National Organization of Women's "Woman of Power and Influence Award" in 2006 and was named one of the "50 Most Influential Minority Lawyers in America" by the National Law Journal in its inaugural list in 2008. In 2006, she was a co-chair for then-Attorney General-Elect Andrew Cuomo's transition team, and previously served as a board member of the Clinton Global Initiative, the National Women's Law Center and the New York City Bar Justice Center, and as a Commissioner on Mayor Bloomberg's Election Modernization Task Force. == See also ==