Richard Conn is the Managing Partner of Eurasia Advisors, General Counsel for the Center for Inquiry, and Managing Partner of Innovate Partners, an emerging company private investment fund. He also serves as an Independent Trustee of a publicly traded mutual fund.

Prior to founding Eurasia Advisors in 2003, Richard practiced international corporate law for nearly 20 years as an equity partner at Latham & Watkins. He founded the firm’s Moscow office in 1992 and served as a key advisor to the Presidential Administration of Russian President Boris Yeltsin. He also served as President of the Moscow-based Foreign Bar Association and has been a longstanding member of the Board of Directors of the U.S.-Russia Business Council and the International Crisis Group’s International Board of Advisors. Throughout his career, he has advised the World Bank, members of Congress, and U.S. administrations on Russia-related issues and co-chaired a joint initiative of the U.S.-Russia Business Council and the American Chamber of Commerce in Moscow to facilitate Russia’s accession to the World Trade Organization.

Richard has been a leading voice on sovereign debt restructuring and international economic governance. On April 28, 2015, he delivered the keynote address at the United Nations opening the U.N. conference on the establishment of a worldwide sovereign debt restructuring framework. He has published extensively on these subjects, including the chapter “Towards a Sovereign Debt Restructuring Framework: Less is More,” which appeared in Joseph Stiglitz’s 2016 book, “Too Little, Too Late: The Quest to Resolve Sovereign Debt Crises” (Columbia University Press). He has lectured at Columbia University’s Harriman Institute of Russian, Eurasian, and East European Studies; the Institute for New Economic Thinking; the Centre for International Governance Innovation; and Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA) Center on Global Economic Governance.

Richard ran in 2010 for the Deputy Presidency of the World Chess Federation on an international ticket headed by the Twelfth World Champion Anatoly Karpov with the support of the Thirteenth World Champion Garry Kasparov and is an avid chess player. He chairs the Advisory Committee of a non-profit organization that has already taught chess to over 4 million public school second- and third-graders in the U.S.

A graduate of Dartmouth College and Fordham University Law School, Richard clerked for the Honorable Gordon Thompson, Jr., Chief Judge of the U.S. District Court, Southern District of California. He is the co-author of Collier Labor Law and the Bankruptcy Code, M. Bender (1989) and the author of The Earthbound Parent: How (and Why) to Raise Your Little Angels Without Religion, Pitchstone Publishing (2018), a book that encourages critical thinking and enhanced ethical standards.

Richard is fluent in Russian and Spanish.