At the panel in the Bay Atlantic University, the roles of race and gender in law-related careers will be examined.
Panelists are:
Alex Diaz-Ferguson (Moderator)
Alex currently serves the Department of Veterans Affairs as an appellate attorney in the Office of General Counsel. A native of Guatemala, Alex moved to the United States in the mid-1990s to Miami, Florida. Upon graduating from the Washington College of Law at American University, Alex worked in government contracts for three years, before transitioning to VA’s Board of Veterans Appeals in 2016. There, he adjudicated appeals from Veterans who were denied Benefits by VA until moving into his current litigation role at the Office of General Counsel.
Kaiya Lyons
Kaiya is the current Civil Rights Litigation Fellow at Bernabei & Kabat, PLLC, where she litigates a wide variety of workplace civil rights and civil liberties issues on behalf of plaintiffs. Before joining Bernabei and Kabat, she served as the Law Fellow to the American Constitution Society in Washington, D.C, and as the Judicial Law Clerk to the Honorable Andrew R. Pearson of the Seventh Judicial District of Minnesota. Ms. Lyons graduated from the University of Minnesota Law School in 2016, where she served as the President of the Minnesota Justice Foundation and Lead Managing Editor of Law and Inequality: A Journal of Theory and Practice. She received her B.A. in political science from The George Washington University in 2013. Ms. Lyons has been published in the Thurgood Marshall School of Law Journal of Gender, Race, and Justice and Law and Inequality: Sua Sponte.
Lilian Leifert
Lilian was born in Sao Paulo, Brazil, and lived in Paris, France, for six years before moving to New York City in 1995. She graduated from the Washington College of Law, American University in 2012 where she was a Note & Comment editor for the Journal of Gender, Social Policy, and the Law. Following law school, she clerked in the Circuit Court for Baltimore City in the civil and criminal divisions, and worked as a litigation support contract attorney reviewing documents in Portuguese, Spanish, and French. She is currently an Associate Counsel at the Department of Veterans Affairs, Board of Veterans Appeals.