Gaurav S Bali

I came to law after UC Berkeley. I spent that year traveling in Europe, and what stayed with me was how much of a person's situation can turn on whether anyone is willing to speak for them. I came home and started where that was most immediate - volunteering at legal clinics around the Bay Area, which taught me more about practicing than any classroom did.

Through law school I worked full time at law firms, moving across practice areas rather than settling into one. That range is why I was able to open my own office as soon as I was licensed, and it is still the most useful thing I bring to a case.

Clients rarely arrive with a problem that stays in one courtroom. A domestic violence allegation can run through criminal court, a restraining order, and a custody calendar at the same time, and what is said in one of them becomes evidence in the next. A personal injury recovery can arrive in the middle of a dissolution, where how it is characterized decides how much of it my client keeps. Before I choose a strategy, I map the whole of a client's exposure - because in litigation the order in which you do things is often worth more than any single argument.

From there my approach is straightforward. I start with an honest valuation of a case: risk assessment, benefits to litigation, and what the other side believes about both. That assessment drives everything after it - what to concede early, what to hold, when a negotiated resolution is genuinely the best result available, and when a case needs to be built for a judge or a jury instead. I would rather give a client an unwelcome assessment at the start than an unwelcome surprise at the end.

I have argued in front of family court judges hundreds of times and taken criminal cases to jury verdict, including homicide. I worked the same way in the clinics, for free, and that is the part I am proudest of - the analysis does not get shorter because the fee does. If you are deciding what to do next, I am glad to talk it through.