Evelynn Tran

Evelynn is the General Counsel for the Santa Clara VTA, the county’s multimodal transportation and congestion management agency. She serves as its chief legal advisor, reporting directly to a 12-member appointed Board of Directors, consisting of elected officials from the county’s 15 city/town councils and the County Board of Supervisors. She is an officer of the agency and an integral member of the executive team. She manages an in-house team of attorneys in the Office of the General Counsel, which provides transactional, regulatory, litigation, and trial services, as well as oversees the work of outside counsel. In 2021, in addition to her role as General Counsel, Evelynn also served as VTA’s Interim General Manager/CEO. She advised on VTA’s 2016 Measure B, estimated to generate $6.3B in tax revenues for transportation infrastructure, and successfully marshalled the measure through the election process. She managed all litigation aspects of real property acquisitions, estimated in excess of $500 million, for VTA’s projects. She advised on the CEQA/NEPA joint environmental document, the certification of which cleared VTA’s $6.9B BSVII Project to construct BART through downtown San Jose. She managed all litigation aspects of real property acquisitions; litigated multi-million dollar cases; and tried cases to favorable jury verdict as lead counsel. Evelynn has also worked on several large P3 and municipal financing transactions. Prior to joining VTA, she litigated and tried cases on behalf of corporate clients and developers in business and real estate matters. Evelynn holds a Juris Doctorate from UC Law, SF (formerly UC Hastings College of the Law), where she was the Executive Editor of the Hastings Constitutional Law Quarterly; an extern for Federal Magistrate Judge James Larson; and a clerk for the California Attorney General's Office, where she defended against Section 1983 civil rights actions. Evelynn is a current board member of AACI (Asian Americans for Community Involvement). She is also a founding member of the National Conference of Vietnamese-American Attorneys and served on its organizing committee in 2006, 2008, 2009, and 2016, and a founding member of the Vietnamese American Professional Women Association of Silicon Valley and sat on its board of directors from 2006 through 2009, 2015, and 2016. She was a Vietnamese American Bar Assoc. of Northern California Trailblazer honoree in 2020 and was recognized as a Woman of Influence by the Silicon Valley Business Journal.