Priya Raman

Priya's story

Priya grew up in Edison, New Jersey, where her parents ran a software consultancy out of the spare bedroom before it grew into a company with ninety employees. She saw first-hand how a badly drafted shareholder agreement nearly tore the business apart when a co-founder left, and she decided at sixteen that she wanted to be the person who prevented that.

She studied engineering at Cornell, worked two years as a product manager, and then went to Columbia Law. At a Wall Street firm she worked on transactions worth billions, but what she loved were the smaller deals where the client was in the room and the outcome changed someone's life.

Her defining deal was the 2018 sale of a third-generation Chicago bakery chain to a private-equity buyer. The family wanted to protect 300 jobs and keep the name. Priya structured an earn-out and a brand licence that did both, and the founder's granddaughter is now the company's CEO. She moved to Chicago for that deal and joined Hale & Mercer the same year.

Priya lives in Lincoln Park with her partner Sam, an architect, and a rescue greyhound named Delta. She sits on the board of the Chicago Women in Business Law network and mentors first-generation law students at Loyola.