The South Asian Bar Association of Northern California is governed by a Board of Directors. All members of the Board actively participate in planning events and directing SABA through our committees.

Kiran Jain is Deputy City Attorney of land use and development in Oakland's City Attorney's Office, primarily practicing land use and environmental law. Previously, she was an associate at Bingham McCutchen in San Francisco and Walnut Creek, where she focused on finance, environmental, land use and real estate law. She was also a member of the firm’s pro bono and diversity committees.

During the 2004 presidential election, Kiran assisted the Lawyers' Committee on Civil Rights Under Law in representing Ohio voters pro hac vice in a successful voting rights lawsuit against Ohio's Secretary of State regarding illegal absentee voting practices.

In 2005 and 2006, she served as staff to the National Commission on the Voting Rights Act that conducted regional hearings throughout the nation to assess continued voter discrimination, which culminated into a congressional report, entitled "Protecting Minority Voters: The Voting Rights Act at Work, 1982-2005".

Kiran serves on the Legal Advisory Board of Kiva.org, a peer-to-peer microlending organization, which she has provided counsel to before its inception in 2005. She is a director and officer of the Barristers Club of the Bar Association of San Francisco. Kiran received her J.D. from Georgetown University Law Center, a Masters in International Affairs from Columbia University, and an A.B. from Barnard College.

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Avin Sharma -- Vice President

Avin Sharma is a litigation associate at Vasquez Benisek & Lindgren LLP, and practices patent infringement and business litigation. Before joining Vasquez, Benisek & Lindgren LLP, Avin was an associate with Morgan Miller Blair and Green Welling LLP. Avin has litigated patent cases involving a number of technologies, and has also represented clients in business disputes in federal and state court involving securities, antitrust, and consumer fraud litigation. Avin received a J.D. from U.C. Hastings College of the Law, and a B.A. in Business Economics and a B.A. in Political Science from U.C. Santa Barbara.  

Avin serves as a member of the Board of Directors for the Barristers Club of the Bar Association of San Francisco. In addition, Avin is also the Co-Chair of the Judicial and Public Appointments Committee for the Asian American Bar Association of the Greater Bay Area.

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Firasat Ali -- Secretary

Firasat is the Secretary and Co-Chair of SABA NC. He also has over a decade of experience in litigating, prosecuting, and counseling clients on intellectual property (IP) matters. His litigation experiences include serving as trial counsel in several high profile patent cases taken successfully to verdict both in Federal District Courts and before the U.S. International Trade Commission (ITC). His prosecution and portfolio management experiences includes preparing and prosecuting patents in a wide range of technologies, managing portfolios, supervising attorneys on prosecution matters, and managing IP issues for two Motorola divisions.

Firasat also has a deep technical background and has worked on legal matters involving civil litigation, licensing, monetization of patents, IP due diligence for mergers & acquisitions and strategic investments, IP asset assessment and valuation, and taxation of IP. He has also acted as primary counsel for companies and helped them with day-to-day corporate and IP issues.

Firasat frequently publishes and speaks on various IP topics. Some of his engagements include University of California Berkley’s Boalt Hall School of Law, India-based Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Ministry of Micro, Small, and Medium Enterprises, India, and Ministry of Commerce and Industry, India, and Motorola, Inc., where Firasat has taught several courses on topics relating to enforcement and thorough protection of intellectual property. Most recently Firasat started Creso Legal, a multi-practice firm with offices across United States that includes seasoned attorneys from reputable schools and law firms. Firasat’s full bio can be viewed at www.CresoLegal.com. 

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Hozefa Botee -- Treasurer

Hozefa practices transactional law in San Francisco and Silicon Valley, specializing largely in the representation of startups and venture capital funds in corporate governance and securities law compliance matters. 

In addition to his legal experience, Hozefa has some five years of experience in Silicon Valley's software industry. Upon moving to Silicon Valley, Hozefa led a software development team at Hyperion Solutions Corp., a medium-sized public company that builds enterprise software. After leaving Hyperion, Hozefa filled many different roles as part of the founding team of Interlace Systems, Inc., an enterprise software startup that was acquired by Oracle Corp. in October 2007. 

Hozefa earned his J.D. from the Northwestern University School of Law (in Chicago). While at Northwestern, Hozefa took several MBA-level business classes from the Kellogg School of Management, and concentrated his studies on corporate law and constitutional law. Also while at Northwestern, Hozefa worked at the Small Business Opportunity Center, a legal clinic organized to help nascent businesses retain transactional legal services at affordable rates. Finally, Hozefa worked on a pro bono criminal appeal before the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals (everything from research to drafting)--the success of this matter was partially responsible for the creation of the Federal Appellate Clinic at Northwestern. Hozefa earned his B.S. from the University of Florida, majoring in Computer Science and Chemistry.

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Arjun Agarwal -- NASABA Liaison

Arjun is an associate at Farella Braun + Martel LLP in San Francisco. His practice is focused on complex construction and real estate litigation matters. Arjun is a graduate of Santa Clara University School of Law and received his undergraduate degree from the University of Western Ontario in Toronto, Canada. Arjun's full bio can be viewed at www.fbm.com.

Veena Dubal is a Staff Attorney at the Asian Law Caucus. Veena joined the Caucus as a Berkeley Law Foundation Fellow in 2008 when she began a taxi project to address and remediate the labor conditions in San Francisco’s largely immigrant taxi driver community. Currently, she also focuses on issues of civil rights in the context of national security, including racial profiling at the border, local law enforcement profiling, and FBI surveillance. Veena received the Northern California South Asian Bar Association Public Interest Attorney of the Year Award in 2009. 

Prior to coming to the Caucus, Veena was on a Fulbright Scholarship in India where she completed Ph.D. research on access to justice and the legal aftermath of the anti-minority violence that swept the state of Gujarat in 2002. While in law school at the University of California at Berkeley, Veena served as a community activist working on issues of racism, imperialism and war through her capacity as volunteer coordinator at the Alliance of South Asians Taking Action. During the tenure of her joint J.D./Ph.D. program at Berkeley, she was awarded the Jurisprudence Award in Law and Middle Eastern Societies, the Critical Language Study Award for Hindi study, the Foreign Language and Area Studies Fellowship, the South Asian Law Student Association Scholarship for Community Organizing, the Adams Scholarship, and was Associate Editor of the Asian Law Journal. She has written widely on civil rights issues, and her community publications include, “The FBI Witch-hunt in Lodi,” (co-written) and “Hum Kar Sakte Hain?” Veena received her B.A. with honors from Stanford University in International Relations with a minor in Feminist Studies.

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Kavya Mohankumar

Kavya Mohankumar is an associate Wilson Elser Moskowitz Edelman & Dicker LLP, in San Francisco, where she specializes in complex commercial litigation. Kavya received her J.D. from Santa Clara University School of law in 2006 and her undergraduate degree is in Genetics and Biochemistry from St. Xaviers College, India. Kavya also serves on the SABA Foundation Board and acts as a liaison between the local chapter and the Foundation Board. Kavya's full bio is available at www.wilsonelser.com.

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Sadhana Narayan

Sadhana is the chief litigator and managing owner of The Narayan Law Firm, one of the largest South Asian American owned law firms in the country. She is the lead counsel on the Firm's Federal, Civil Rights and Employment practice areas and focuses primarily on 42 USC §1983 Civil Rights Litigation, Employment and Complex Litigation matters. Sadhana's full bio is available at www.narayanlawfirm.com.

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Suchitra Narayen

Suchitra Narayen is a Senior Legal Director with the Global Sales and Services legal group of Sun Microsystems, Inc. She joined Sun in 1999, initially supporting a number of product groups with respect to inbound licensing and product release issues. In her current role, she oversees outbound sales, services and licensing transactions and general governance matters for the Emerging Markets region, which includes Mexico, Central and South America, Africa, the Middle East, Eastern Europe, India, China, Hong Kong and Taiwan. 
In addition to her legal role, Suchitra is a Certified Sigma Black Belt and the Master Black Belt for the Sun Legal and Compliance department. She has also pioneered the use of offshore legal resources to enhance productivity and improve cost effectiveness.
Suchitra is a Gold Medalist who received her LL.B from the University of Calgary and is admitted to practice in Alberta, Canada and California. Prior to joining Sun, Suchitra was a litigation attorney at Pettit & Martin and Coudert Brothers and the Managing Litigation Attorney at Acer America, where she handled complex M&A/restructuring matters in addition to IP, employment and commercial litigation.

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Nina Paul

Nina Paul practices employment discrimination law on behalf of employees. Nina received her J.D. from UC Hastings College of the Law, where she was Editor-in-Chief of the Hastings Constitutional Law Quarterly and President of the South Asian Law Students Association, and her B.A. in Economics from UC Berkeley.

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Sujal Shah

Sujal Shah is Counsel in the San Francisco office of Bingham McCutchen LLP. His practice focuses on antitrust litigation and counseling and appellate matters. He has defended clients against allegations of Sherman Act and Clayton Act violations, represented clients seeking merger approval before the Department of Justice, and has counseled clients on IP and antitrust matters. He also is active in a number of pro bono matters involving voting rights, discrimination, employment claims, and the death penalty. Previously, Sujal was a teaching fellow at Columbia Law School.

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Mythily Sivarajah

Mythily is a plaintiff-side employment law attorney with the law firm of Adams | Nye | Trapani | Becht LLP in San Francisco. The focus of her practice involves representing plaintiffs/employees in employment discrimination and wrongful termination matters. 

Mythily earned her J.D. from the University of San Francisco, where she received the American Bar Association/ Bureau of National Affairs Award for Excellence in the Study of Labor and Employment Law. While in law school, she was an extern at the Fair Employment and Housing Commission, an intern at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission's Legal Unit, and represented clients in EEOC mediations and wage and hour conferences and hearings as part of a clinic. Prior to starting her work as a lawyer, she also volunteered with the Centre for Women's Development and Research in Chennai, in an effort to formulate minimum wage standards for domestic workers. Mythily obtained her bachelor of science degree from Cornell University with a major in Industrial and Labor Relations and was a Cornell National Scholar.

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Sandeep Solanki

Sandeep Solanki is a counsel in the San Francisco office of O'Melveny & Myers LLP and a member of the Business Trial and Litigation Practice. Sandeep has represented clients in securities litigation, intellectual property matters, consumer and products liability actions, SEC proceedings, and general commercial litigation. He also has represented clients pro bono in immigration and civil rights cases. Sandeep received his J.D. from New York University School of Law and a B.B.A. from the University of Michigan.
Sheena WadhawanSheena Wadhawan graduated from the University of California, Hastings College of the Law in 2006 with a Public Interest Concentration. Sheena is committed to serving low-income communities and using her law practice to affect social change. Sheena spent over two years serving in the Oakland City Attorney's Neighborhood Law Corps where she combined community organizing with litigation to improve the quality of life in Oakland's most troubled neighborhoods. Sheena recently started her own practice focused on assisting low-income tenants and employees with housing and employment-related matters including defending against wrongful eviction, and wage and hour claims. In addition to the South Asian Bar Association, Sheena is an active member of the San Francisco and Alameda County Bar Associations.

Sheena Wadhawan graduated from the University of California, Hastings College of the Law in 2006 with a Public Interest Concentration. Sheena is committed to serving low-income communities and using her law practice to affect social change. Sheena spent over two years serving in the Oakland City Attorney's Neighborhood Law Corps where she combined community organizing with litigation to improve the quality of life in Oakland's most troubled neighborhoods. Sheena recently started her own practice focused on assisting low-income tenants and employees with housing and employment-related matters including defending against wrongful eviction, and wage and hour claims. In addition to the South Asian Bar Association, Sheena is an active member of the San Francisco and Alameda County Bar Associations.