Lisa A. Ells

Ells started her career as a business consultant and product manager for a Bay Area startup during the dot-com boom of the late '90s. She found little passion or inspiration in the work, however, and said she "floundered" for a bit until she met a civil rights attorney that did impact litigation. That was the light bulb moment.

"I didn't know you could be a lawyer working on behalf of incarcerated people or people with disabilities and make that a career," Ells said. "I found that it was possible to combine my interest and passion for making the world better, with something I felt I was naturally inclined toward, the law."

She represents clients in a variety of constitutional law, employment discrimination, First Amendment and disability access disputes. She is particularly experienced in appellate law.

Ells recently secured a $250,000 settlement under the Americans with Disabilities Act and related federal and state statutes on behalf of a deaf woman repeatedly denied sign language interpretation services at LAC+USC Medical Center, including during a three-day hospitalization in which she underwent surgery to remove an organ. Chavez v. County of Los Angeles, 2:19-cv-10735-JAK-RAO (C.D. Cal., filed December 19, 2019). The settlement also includes an injunctive component requiring the county to ensure all future deaf and hard-of-hearing patients will receive effective communication when seeking treatment in county health care facilities.

"It was very important to her that nobody else go to the public hospital in L.A. that she went to and have the experience she had--having no idea what was happening to her body, the very real terror of going into the operating room not understanding what's happening, without any idea of whether she even needed the procedure or whether she could put it off--all the basic things that people able to hear can experience," Ells said.

She is also co-lead counsel on a case that concerns the rights of over 30,000 incarcerated people to constitutionally adequate mental health care in California's prisons. Coleman v. Newsom 424 F. Supp. 3d. 925 (E.D. Cal., 2019). The longstanding suit, originally filed in 1990, predates Ells, and she has been working on it for the entirety of her career.

Ells was part of the trial and appellate team that secured the historic U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Brown v. Plata 131 S.Ct. 1910 (2011) and helped achieve reforms addressing the overuse of segregation, inappropriate use of force and access to psychiatric hospitalization. In 2019, she led the trial team that secured a landmark order finding California prison officials intentionally presented misleading data to the court to conceal the inadequacy of the mental health care being provided. She has briefed and argued three appeals in the Ninth Circuit since 2018, each of which resulted in unanimous rulings for the plaintiffs. She is also lead counsel on two currently pending appeals.

"I have this nice balance in my practice between working on individual cases with people who have suffered acute discrimination, like Claudia Chavez, while also engaging in very large cases that can provide for systemic change and help a lot of people," she said.

- JenniferChungKlam