Alumni of the Year: Seema N. Patel ‘06 (Vol. 94)

Seema N. Patel serves as a Practitioner in Residence at the UC Berkeley Labor Center and a Lecturer at UC Berkeley School of Law. For twenty (20) years, Seema has advocated for low-wage workers’ rights. Previously, Seema served as Clinical Director for the East Bay Community Law Center (EBCLC), where she oversaw Berkeley Law’s eight community-based clinics and taught movement lawyering. She served as the inaugural Deputy Director of San Francisco’s Office of Labor Standards Enforcement (SF OLSE), overseeing implementation of some of the first municipal progressive mandates of their kind. Seema served in the Obama Administration as Senior Advisor to the White House Initiative on Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders (WHIAAPI); and at the Office of the Solicitor, U.S. Department of Labor—first as an Appellate Litigator in Washington, D.C., and later as a Trial Attorney in San Francisco. After law school, Seema clerked on the U.S. District Court for the District of Maryland and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, after which she moved to Gujarat, India to organize “ragpickers” (trash collectors) into a cooperative society. Prior to law school, Seema organized immigrant laundry workers on the east coast. During law school, she served as Diversity Editor at CLR.

Seema has remained an advocate for diversity on CLR and at the law school even after graduating, helping run CLR diversity trainings for many years. She has also served as a mentor for many Berkeley Law students, especially women of color.