Meet Marissa Roy, Candidate For Los Angeles City Attorney

LOS ANGELES, CA — Marissa Roy, 34, is vying to be elected as Los Angeles city attorney.

Roy is facing off against John McKinney in the Nov. 3 general election.

Learn more about Roy's goals for Los Angeles:

What is your educational background?

I studied at USC and majored in philosophy. I then attended Yale Law School, where I worked in a legal clinic with the San Francisco City Attorney’s Office for two years. As part of that clinic, I helped build groundbreaking cases to fight big tech and fossil fuel companies as well as worked on my first lawsuit against the first Trump administration, suing in my final semester and obtaining a preliminary injunction before I even graduated.

What is your professional background?

I am a career government attorney. I started at the LA City Attorney’s Office, where I built wage theft cases that put thousands of dollars back in workers’ pockets. I then represented LA County as outside counsel in over a dozen legal actions against the Trump administration. Now, I’m a consumer protection attorney at the California Department of Justice, where I am suing billion-dollar tech companies and obtained a half-million dollar judgment to protect tenants from an abusive landlord.

Have you ever held public office, whether appointive or elective?

I am a first-time candidate who also has supported over 100 women running for state and local office in California.

The city attorney has significant discretion over misdemeanor cases. Name one category of misdemeanor cases you believe the office should prosecute more aggressively and one category in which you would make use of diversion or decline prosecution. Why?

I understand the political appeal of a one-size-fits-all approach to misdemeanor prosecution, but Los Angeles needs to be smart about safety: Just as a good lawyer would never give their client the same advice in every category of case, there is no one category of misdemeanor in which I would rule out or commit to any particular outcome.

When a misdemeanor charge is referred to the city attorney, the goal should be safety. We will employ prosecution where appropriate, such as violent offenses that harm the physical safety of Angelenos. Where there is a nonviolent misdemeanor with an underlying mental health or addiction issue, for example, supervised diversion programs that connect people with services are much more effective at addressing the root cause and preventing future offenses, therefore making the community safer. We will tailor the approach to be smart about safety.

Most importantly, we need to build public safety solutions with communities. I will restore the Neighborhood Prosecutor program, creating a direct line to the City Attorney’s Office, so that we can craft solutions that are specific to the unique needs of Los Angeles’ neighborhoods and help prevent crime before it happens.

How aggressively should the city attorney use affirmative civil litigation against landlords, employers, corporations or other private entities? What criteria would you use to decide which cases justify city resources?

I am running to transform the City Attorney’s Office into our most powerful check on corporate misconduct. The LA city attorney has the power under state law to sue any business for engaging in unlawful, unfair, or deceptive conduct — that means the office could be taking businesses engaging in wage theft, slumlords harassing tenants, and companies dumping toxic chemicals to court. The biggest theft in Los Angeles is wage theft — the billions of dollars that companies steal from workers by not paying minimum wage, overtime, for meal and rest breaks, or by misclassifying them as gig workers — and the City Attorney’s Office needs to be litigating to win that money back for workers. There have been 23,000 complaints of tenant harassment that have resulted in less than 10 legal actions, and the City Attorney’s Office needs to be enforcing these protections against bad actors. The City Attorney’s Office needs to be investigating the companies responsible for the warehouse fire in Boyle Heights and filing litigation to win relief for impacted communities.

This is the work I’ve done in my career — suing companies stealing wages and winning back thousands for workers, investigating abusive landlords and winning half a million back for tenants, and taking on Meta for their harm to our kids. The types of cases I bring share common criteria: they involve gross corporate misconduct that impacts an underserved population which would be unlikely to fight for their own rights. The City Attorney’s Office is there to take on the fights that workers, renters, immigrants, and underserved communities shouldn’t be expected to shoulder alone. The City Attorney’s Office needs to fight for the people, not the powerful.

Both you and your opponent have said the city should reduce its reliance on outside attorneys. What specific change would you make to outside-counsel spending during your first year, and under what circumstances would you still hire an outside law firm?

My priority is building the strength of the City Attorney’s Office, not lining the pockets of outside law firms. Spending on outside counsel has spiraled out of control under this administration: while former city attorneys have spent around $2 million annually on outside counsel, this city attorney has regularly spent upwards of $15 million annually. Cutting these bloated contracts would not only save tens of millions in legal fees, but they would also ensure that cases are run more cost-efficiently: deputy city attorneys generally resolve cases at a quarter of the cost of outside counsel, who are incentivized by hourly billing to overstaff and overextend litigation. I will cut the unnecessary spending on outside law firms and use outside counsel only when there is a genuine conflict or a niche specialty that doesn’t justify hiring a full-time attorney. Otherwise, I will focus on rebuilding the office to handle our matters internally to preserve taxpayer dollars.

The city attorney oversees an office of roughly 1,000 legal professionals. What specific changes would you make to the office’s management, staffing or internal operations during your first year, and how would you measure whether those changes are working?

Strengthening the management and internal operations of the City Attorney’s Office means better serving the people of Los Angeles. To do so, I will focus on restoring competence by improving office culture, reducing excess spending, and reorienting the office toward public service.

I have already been collaborating with the attorneys and staff in the City Attorney’s Office to build a plan to heal what has been broken and set the office up for success. For our civil defense and municipal work, we will be cutting exorbitant spending on outside counsel and building processes to resolve cases more cost-effectively while building infrastructure and compliance. For our criminal work, we will be restoring the Neighborhood Prosecutor Program and rebuilding the specializations that were eliminated. For our public rights work, we will use the model of other cities to build this work to be revenue-generating and self-sustaining so we can do more work in service of the people.

Throughout my 20-month campaign, I have spoken with over 100 attorneys and staff so that we are already laying the groundwork for these plans together. I plan to manage with the talented attorneys in the office so that we are all invested in building a City Attorney’s Office that serves the people.

Candidates' responses were lightly edited for style and clarity.