Bio
As Director of Program and Advocacy at Bay Area Legal Aid (“BayLegal”), Ariella is responsible for integrating BayLegal’s programs – across its seven-county firm, multiple practice areas, and multifaceted approaches (direct legal services, impact advocacy, and community work). Ariella coordinates and strategizes with BayLegal’s Managing Attorneys, Regional Counsel and Director of Litigation to enhance the firm’s impact and leverage its unique expertise in serving low-income communities. As a key member of BayLegal’s Leadership Team, she participates in strategic decision-making regarding the larger program’s operations, firm-wide policies and allocation of resources. She also trains and mentors the firm’s supervisors, creating supervision systems to support their effectiveness.
For 16 years, Ariella served as Managing Attorney of BayLegal’s largest office (Alameda County), leading a team of 45 attorneys, support staff, and social workers in providing high quality legal services to low-income county residents in domestic violence, family law, housing, economic justice, health access, youth justice, disability rights, immigration, and reentry legal services.
Prior to this, as a Domestic Violence Staff Attorney in BayLegal’s San Francisco office (formerly San Francisco Neighborhood Legal Assistance Foundation), Ariella represented domestic violence survivors across multiple practice areas, engaged in extensive and impactful policy advocacy on local, state and national levels, trained professionals across multiple disciplines, and published various articles on interpersonal violence and its intersections with welfare, healthcare, and family law.
Ariella also served as a Lecturer at The University of California Berkeley Law School, where she taught the Field Placement Workshop, exploring lawyering topics with students engaged in internships in government agencies and public interest nonprofits. This is her 3rd year as co-Instructor and faculty advisor of the Legal Externship Program at UC Law SF College of the Law.
Education
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B.A., Brown University
B.A. -
Harvard Law School
J.D.