C.J. Mahoney

C.J. Mahoney serves as Corporate Vice President and General Counsel at Microsoft, where he leads the team responsible for the legal support for the company’s products, services, marketing, and sales activities.

C.J. joined Microsoft in 2021 after serving as Deputy United States Trade Representative from 2018 to 2020. While at USTR, C.J. led negotiations over the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA) and helped shepherd the agreement through Congress, where it passed with the largest margin of any trade agreement in over 30 years. He personally negotiated key aspects of the agreement’s landmark labor chapter, including the first-of-its-kind, rapid-response enforcement mechanism. C.J. represented USTR on the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) and initiated USTR’s first-ever dispute settlement proceedings to enforce environmental in U.S. trade agreements.

Prior to his unanimous confirmation as Deputy USTR, C.J. was a partner at Williams & Connolly LLP where his practice focused on complex commercial litigation, white collar defense, and international disputes. He was a law clerk to Associate Justice Anthony Kennedy during the Supreme Court’s October 2007 term and served as a Visiting Lecturer at Yale Law School, where he taught a course on international arbitration.

C.J. is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and serves on the Board of the Robert J. Dole Institute of Politics at the University of Kansas, the State Department’s Advisory Council on International Law, and the Global Tech Security Commission.

A native of Russell, Kansas, C.J. is a graduate of Harvard College and Yale Law School, where he was Editor-in-Chief of the Yale Law Journal. He and his wife, Becca, have two children, Eleanor (14) and Patrick (11).