Rachel is the Directing Attorney of Public Counsel’s Audrey Irmas Project for Women and Girls’ Rights. Prior to her role as Directing Attorney, she was a Senior Supervising Staff Attorney with Public Counsel’s Children’s Rights Project.
Rachel has been with Public Counsel for many years, initially joining the organization in 2012 as a staff attorney with the Adoptions team in the Children’s Rights Project (CRP) and most recently returning in 2020 to lead the Transition Age Youth (TAY) team in CRP. As the TAY team supervisor, Rachel helped expand the team and she supported the team in providing holistic, trauma-informed legal services to system-impacted youth in the areas of housing, family law, public benefits, traffic tickets, and name and gender change petitions. Rachel also led the TAY team’s housing policy work. In partnership with community-based coalitions and the office of Supervisor Hilda Solis, Rachel helped secure the passage of a Board of Supervisors’ motion that created contingency plans to help house the 1300 youth who were facing “the Extended Foster Care cliff” as they exited foster care from LA County in December 2021. Rachel has particular expertise in the areas of public benefits and housing for system-impacted youth. Prior to transitioning to public interest work, Rachel practiced employment law, first at Munger, Tolles & Olson LLP and then at Fox Group Legal (21st Century Fox).
Rachel is both a lawyer and a social worker, having received her JD from the University of Michigan Law School in 2006 and her MSW from the University of Michigan School of Social Work in 2007. She received her undergraduate degree from Swarthmore College in 2001, and she clerked with the Honorable Cormac J. Carney in the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California after completing graduate school.
