Claire’s management experience includes nine years as the executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Virginia where she managed a growing staff and budget, eight years as a Deputy Attorney General and hiring “partner” in the Virginia AG’s office, and a year as the interim president of a women’s college facing a budget and enrollment crisis.

Claire started her career as a federal civil rights lawyer and then served as assistant university counsel and assistant secretary of the corporation at Princeton University, where she staffed several committees of the Board of Trustees and lectured in the politics department.

Later, as assistant general counsel and associate director of the Office of Federal Regulatory Affairs at the American Council on Education, Claire managed a variety of federal regulatory issues affecting higher education including affirmative action, gender equity in athletics, unrelated business income tax, human subject research, small producer hazardous waste and reasonable accommodation of disabled students, faculty, and staff.

In private practice at Hogan & Hartson (now Hogan Lovells), Claire helped build the firm's higher education practice representing and advising public and private colleges and universities on accreditation matters, faculty tenure issues, academic freedom, governance issues, health care provider questions, environmental issues, export/import problems, building design and construction problems, government contracts and audit issues, Title IX compliance and student personnel matters, among others.

Most recently, she has been a partner at Dunlap Law, PLC helping to build and grow a woman-owned tech forward law firm seeking to move the legal profession away from the billable hour as a measure of value.

Claire’s nonprofit board experience includes service on the boards of local, state, and national organizations. Claire was a trustee of Chatham College (now Chatham University) from 1981-87. She is a former member of the national board of directors of the National Association of College and University Attorneys (NACUA) and was honored as one of the first two "Fellows" of the Association in recognition of her contributions to higher education law. In 2002, the Governor of Virginia appointed Claire to a four-year term as one of Virginia's Commissioners on the Education Commission of the States. She also served on the national Board of Directors of the National Association of Women Business Owners and as a member of Virginia’s Small Business Advisory Board.

Claire now serves on the Boards of Directors of the Metropolitan Business League and Leadership Metro Richmond where she serves as the Chair of the Governance Committee on both boards. (She is a member of the LMR class of 1996.) Previously she has served on the Boards of the Diversity Conference of the Virginia State Bar, the Metropolitan Richmond Women's Bar Association, the Girl Scouts of the Commonwealth Council, the Richmond Gay Community Foundation (now Diversity Richmond), the Richmond Metropolitan Convention and Visitors Bureau, the Virginia Foundation for Women, and the Poe Museum. She also served on the Virginia State Advisory Committee to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights from 2015-2019.

Both the Small Business Administration and NAWBO have recognized Claire for her advocacy on behalf of women owned businesses. She has been honored twice for her advocacy on behalf of the LGBTQ community, once in 2013 by the Serpentine Society at the University of Virginia which honored her with the Bernard D. Mayes award and a second time in 2015 when Equality Virginia named her as one of its OUTstanding Virginians in recognition of her decades of advocacy work including serving as EV's interim director and campaign manager for The Commonwealth Coalition 2006 campaign against Virginia's anti-marriage equality amendment.

In 2010, the Virginia Lawyer's Weekly named Claire as one of the 50 Women of Influence in Virginia, in 2019 it named her as the Leader in the Law for that year, and in 2024 it inducted her into the Lawyer’s Weekly Hall of Fame. Claire is a 2015 fellow of the Virginia Law Foundation and was the Richmond YWCA's Outstanding Woman in Law in 1994. Richmond Raceway and the Richmond Times Dispatch recognized Claire in 2025 as one of the Women Who Drive Richmond.