Meet Our Diversity Committee at LPS Law

Mission Statement
Diversity Team

LPS Law is honored to have been presented with the prestigious Gold Seal from the California State Bar’s Leadership Seal Program – the Program’s highest-level award. This recognition reflects our firm’s commitment to promoting diversity, equity, and inclusion (“DEI”) within the legal profession.

As a leader in the legal community, LPS earned this Gold Seal status by implementing at least nine of the ten research-driven action items set by the State Bar’s Council on Access and Fairness (COAF). These action items included developing a strategic DEI plan, conducting implicit bias training, and integrating DEI responsibilities into leadership roles. Although LPS had already implemented some of these action items before the Leadership Seal Program even existed, through its collaboration with COAF, the firm has been able to expand upon the Four Pillars of its Diversity Committee's¹ Mission Statement, namely:

ADVOCATE for the underrepresented sectors;
EDUCATE those around us about microaggressions, systemic and inherent biases, and the potential for change;
COLLABORATE with our local partners championing diversity causes; and
DEDICATE our human and financial capital to those same causes.

LPS proudly promotes a respectful work environment. The firm is a collaborative group and our DEI initiatives set us apart from other work cultures. The respect for our staff, clients and peers is one highlight of many, and our commitment to exemplify excellence shines bright firm wide.

Moreover, the firm’s community involvement underscores our unwavering dedication to fostering an inclusive legal environment, setting a positive example for others, and actively working to help shape a more equitable justice system for all.

¹The Diversity Committee was established by unanimous vote of a 2020 amendment to LPS’s charter document – the firm’s Partnership Agreement. The Committee is constituted of five members, including at least one but no more than two from the following categories: administrative staff, non-partner attorneys, members of the partnership.

LPS Supports

The Homeless Prenatal Program
The Homeless Prenatal Program is a nationally-recognized family resource center in San Francisco providing services to more than 3,500 low-income and homeless families annually, including:

Perinatal services to promote healthy pregnancies, births and bonding;
Housing support including education, resources and limited rental assistance;
Job training, financial education and other resources to encourage family stability and self-sufficiency.

The American Indian College Fund
Through which seventy-two cents of each donated dollar goes directly to scholarships, programs, and public education.

The Justice and Diversity Center of the Bar Association of San Francisco
The Justice & Diversity Center (JDC) advances fairness and equality by providing pro bono legal services to low-income people and educational programs that foster diversity in the legal profession.

San Francisco Destination Law School
Which operates under the umbrella of BASF’s Justice & Diversity Center.

LGBT Asylum Project
Provides accessible legal representation for LGBT asylum seekers who are fleeing persecution due to their sexual orientation, gender identity and/or HIV status.

Safe and Sound
Partners with communities and families to pioneer an approach to prevent and reduce the impact of childhood abuse, neglect, and trauma.

San Francisco-Marin Food Bank
Addresses hunger head-on from its food pantry network to home-delivered groceries to CalFresh (food stamp) enrollment.

Golden Gate National Parks Conservancy
Preserves Golden Gate national parks, enhances the experiences of park visitors, and builds a community dedicated to conserving the parks for the future.

Legal Alliance for Reproductive Rights (“LARR”)
LARR provides pro bono legal assistance in states including California for individuals, health providers, and organizations affected by legislation that criminalizes or subjects people to civil litigation for seeking or facilitating access to reproductive care.”

Past Recipients Include

Lorraine Hansberry Theatre
Founded in San Francisco in 1981 to celebrate the African American experience, LHT recently launched its Fund for New Black Voices.

The California Bridging the Digital Divide Fund
Working to provide devices, connectivity, and related digital learning supports for PK-12 students, teachers, and their families.

Oakland Black Business Fund
The Oakland Black Business Fund (OBBF) is a Black-led investment platform, providing capital, technical assistance, and growth strategy to Black-owned businesses.

Beth Zuckerman

Vice-Chair

I am a legal assistant working with the firm's Estate Planning, Business Transactional, and Real Estate Groups. My several decades of working in law firms include extensive experience in the tax area as well. Before I began my career in law firms, in 1988, I spent a legislative term working for then‑New York State Senate Minority Leader Fred Ohrenstein, with the opportunity to see the sausage‑making up close. I worked on issues such as divestment from South Africa, marital property and drug policy reform, and halting the privatization of prisons.

I am the child of a Coptic teacher who immigrated from Cairo in the 1950's and a Methodist minister with heritage in Massachusetts and Upstate New York dating from colonial times. My mother's family has members living in many different parts of the world: all over the US, and in Canada, Australia, and Saudi Arabia. My brother has continued the tradition of mixing continents and has two children whose mother is from Brazil. My husband is Jewish, and I also have in-laws who were refugees from the Iranian Revolution. As a person with both colonizing and colonized heritage, I am particularly interested in educating myself on the situations of indigenous peoples.

My father was an activist for women's reproductive rights in the early 1970's. By the 1980's, he began to include me in his activism, bringing me to hold up signs protesting US activities in El Salvador in the square in his adopted New England town. When I lived in Upstate New York, I traveled by bus to march on Washington three times, twice for women's reproductive rights and once against the first Iraq War. Most of my social change activity since moving to California in 1993 has involved political campaigns rather than more direct activism, but I have been involved in letter-writing to improve women's health care. I also am a photographer, and I am interested in using visual storytelling to effect positive social outcomes.

I am excited to be working on improving diversity and inclusion at LPS.

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Katie Parker

Member

I am an attorney working primarily with the firm’s Estate Planning and Business Transactional groups.
I was born and raised in the Bay Area, and although I have lived in Boston, New York, Munich, and Aix-en-Provence, I have always considered the Bay Area to be my home.

My path to the practice of law has been circuitous. I studied comparative literature in college and taught high school English for five years before beginning my studies at UC Law SF (formerly UC Hastings). I was drawn to teaching because of a desire to help others, and a belief that education can be a leveling force. When I decided to leave education and pursue a career in law, I knew that I wanted to continue to help others. In law school, I concentrated in taxation, and I worked in an accounting firm after graduation to further deepen my understanding of tax and how it affects individuals, businesses, and estates.

I am excited to serve on the Diversity Committee to continue the work of helping others and promoting education within the firm to further the firm’s commitment to diversity and inclusion.

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Selina Le

Member

I am the operations/facilities lead at LPS law. I graduated from San Francisco State University, class of 2016, majoring in Criminal Justice. My guiding principle in life is to help those who have been treated with injustice and have experienced economic hardship.

For a time after graduating from college I aspired to become a lawyer or paralegal, but during the Covid 19 pandemic I threw myself into helping to keep my family's restaurant afloat. For my entire life I've had to juggle school and help manage my family's restaurant, where I have worked since I was in middle school and where I still help to this day. The greatest hardship my family and I have gone through was the Covid pandemic's disruption to our family's restaurant.

Life has taken me in different directions throughout my life. After experiencing certain legal and business professional roles, I finally came to conclusion that I would love to become a certified CPA and obtain my certificate from the Boston Institute of Finance. My passion and dedication in helping people is my motivation to pursue with my goals and achievements. I believe that becoming a professional advisor would strengthen my financial future as well as provide help to people in managing their finances. Obtaining this operations/facilities lead position at LPS, where I am also getting some training in accounting, is the first step to pursuing my goal, and I strive to continue to learn and grow.

I wish to use my position on the Diversity Committee to assist with our firm's commitment to diversity and inclusion, and also to educate those within the firm and in the community about issues relating to diversity and inclusion.

I appreciate and value every opportunity I have received, which has helped me to learn and grow in my career path. I hope that my dedication on the Diversity Committee will help to broaden our firm's involvement with our community. I hope not only to expand our support to nonprofit organizations and individuals, but also to educate the firm and this community to better serve and help others.

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Chris Donnelly

Member Emeritus

Before retiring from the active practice of law in December 2022, I practiced family law since I joined LPS in 1990 as a newly graduated attorney associate at age thirty-four. Before law school I was variously a structural steel construction worker, shipyard worker, and editor of a trade union monthly newspaper.

In the diversity context, my earliest and still primary background would be racial justice and civil rights. Coming from a multi-racial family in a small town in the 1960s, racial prejudice meant people failing to recognize the humanity of my adopted Korean sisters. My family was one of a few that hosted Black kids from Paterson, NJ in the summertime – one more at the dinner table when there were already eight or nine kids just added to the fun! But not all the neighbors approved.

When Martin Luther King was assassinated in April 1968, my father took a handful of us kids to Newark, NJ, for a march billed as the Black/White Peace March. I was eleven years old. Tens of thousands marched that day through the streets of Newark -- and in that suffering city, during that troubled month, the peace blessedly held.

After I came West to San Francisco, my eyes began to open on issues surrounding sexual identity. I am proud to say that today I am a godparent to a beautiful young woman who has two mothers. On gender equality, I strove over the decades to make the LPS workplace a welcoming home for women, who should not have to stand for hostility, harassment, being belittled or patronized, from the grand scale to the micro, in order to earn a living.

I am a firm supporter of the Council on Islamic American Relations (SF Bay Area Chapter).

Personally, I have had beloved family members with disabilities – physical challenges and cognitive challenges both. Nobody should ever dispute the humanity or diminish the potential of another based on disability. Finally, during my three-plus decades of practice, I always found support at LPS for my commitment to pro bono work, which over my career has spanned the gamut from representing near-indigent clients, to serving our profession in as a fee arbitrator in attorney-client fee disputes, training attorneys in representing low-income family law clients, and working with the local family law courts in various capacities, primarily assisting divorcing people in bringing their matters to settlement.

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