Kunoor Chopra
- Vice President, Legal Services and Co-Founder, Elevate Services
Kunoor is Co-founder and VP of Legal Services at Elevate. She built the legal services offerings that are part of Elevate’s portfolio of solutions, including in litigation, contracts, compliance and intellectual property. She works closely with customers to understand their enterprise challenges and brings the right suite of technology, services and consulting to meet their needs. She designs rightsourced solutions focused on combining people, process, technology and data in innovative ways that enable customers to modernize and optimize operations.
Throughout her career, Kunoor has spearheaded the transformation of the legal industry by creating platforms that provide effective and efficient options to obtain, manage, and perform legal services. She has been instrumental in transforming the legal industry, from her days at the forefront of the early days of legal process outsourcing to helping build one Elevate.
Kunoor is a recognized authority in the legal industry on topics related to women in entrepreneurship, diversity and inclusion, legal outsourcing, right sourcing of legal work, and optimization of legal work. She is a Fellow of the College of Law Practice Management Fellow and serves as a member of its Board of Trustees. She also co-chairs the South Asian Bar Association’s LGBTQ+ Section. In September 2020, World Commerce & Contracting, the leading global association for commercial and contract management professionals, recognized her contributions to commerce and society by including her in its first-ever “Inspiring Women in Commerce and Contracting” honors.
Kunoor is a licensed California attorney and previously practiced general litigation with Nossaman and Fulbright & Jaworski in Los Angeles, California.
Suman Chakraborty
Suman Chakraborty is a Member at Mintz, Levin, Cohn, Ferris, Glovsky & Popeo in New York, where he is a part of the Litigation and Insurance/Reinsurance Disputes groups. He is an industry-recognized first-chair litigator with two decades of experience advocating in high value arbitrations, and in state and federal court litigation across the country. Collaborative and client-focused, Suman develops dispute resolution strategies tailored to his clients’ business objectives. He leverages his deep industry experience and knowledge to serve as both a determined litigator and a trusted advisor, helping his clients navigate and resolve the full range of risks they face.
For several years, Chambers USA has listed Suman as a leading attorney in its insurer-side disputes rankings. His surging reputation has also been recognized in Legal 500, Benchmark Litigation, Expert Guides, and Who’s Who of Insurance and Reinsurance, and he is frequently invited to share his insights at industry conferences.
Suman also devotes his time to pro bono efforts and his past efforts have included providing successful representation of political asylum applicants and drafting amicus briefs to the state and federal appellate courts on issues such as same sex marriage, conversion therapy and the rights of same sex adoptive parents. He is a former Co-Chair of the Board of Directors of the National LGBTQ Task Force, the country’s oldest national LGBTQ advocacy group. He also previously served as Vice President of the Board of Trustees of FFR/Princeton BTGALA.
Swethaa Ballakrishnen
- Assistant Professor of Law, University of California, Irvine
Swethaa Ballakrishnen is Assistant Professor of Law (and, by courtesy, of Sociology, Asian American Studies, and Criminology, Law and Society) at the University of California, Irvine. Primarily oriented within a critical socio-legal praxis, they write, think, and teach about law's connection to actors/institutions/relationships at the periphery, usually around identities/queers/souths.
Ballakrishnen’s work has appeared in, among other journals, the Law and Society Review, Law and Social Inquiry, International Journal of the Legal Profession, and the Canadian Review of Sociology. Their first book, Accidental Feminism, explores the case of unintended gender parity in the Indian legal profession and was published by Princeton University Press in 2021. Other book projects focus on collaborative legal globalization (Invisible Institutionalisms, ed. w/Sara Dezalay), gendered inheritances of constitutional privacy (w/Kalpana Kannabiran), and inequ(al)ities in legal education (ed. w/Bryant Garth).
Ballakrishnen currently serves as an elected trustee on the boards of the Law and Society Association and the ISA’s Research Committee on Sociology of Law, and am on the Executive Committee for the AALS Section on Empirical Study of Legal Education/Profession. At UCI, they co-run a center on the legal profession, a critical interdisciplinary graduate emphasis and a workshop on socio-legal studies.
Manjusha (Manju) Kulkarni
- Executive Director, Asian Pacific Policy and Planning Council (A3PCON)
Manjusha (Manju) P. Kulkarni is Executive Director of the Asian Pacific Policy and Planning Council (A3PCON), a coalition of more than forty community-based organizations that serves and represents the 1.5 million Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders in Los Angeles County. She also co-founded Stop AAPI Hate, the nation’s leading aggregator of COVID-19-related hate incidents against AAPIs. Additionally, she is a Lecturer in the Asian American Studies Department at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA).
Manju’s work has been featured in the New York Times, and on CBS News and CNN, as well as in numerous ethnic media outlets. In 2014, she received the White House Champions of Change award from President Barack Obama for her dedication to improving health care access for Asians American communities. Recently, she testified before Congress at the House Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights and Civil Liberties, on the issue of anti-Asian hate.
Manju holds a Bachelor of Arts degree from Duke University and a Juris Doctor degree from Boston University School of Law.
Maya Satya Reddy
- Founder & Co-Director, Queer Asian Social Club
Maya Reddy is a queer South Asian former professional golfer, LGBTQ+ athlete activist, Athlete Ally Ambassador, founder of the Queer Asian Social Club, and a Toll Public Interest Scholar in the University of Pennsylvania Law School class of 2022. She was a three-time NCAA All-American and gained status on the Symetra Tour before having to take a step back from the sport due to its exclusive culture and the many harmful experiences she endured, as a result of that culture. Maya focused her pain in fighting for and becoming an advocate for LGBTQ-inclusive policies in sports and decided to pursue a law degree to strengthen her work in inclusive policy formation, advocacy, and litigation defending trans and queer athletes.