HONOREE

Professor Paul Belonick serves his community by helping early-stage startups and teaching UCLA and UC Hastings College of Law students through UC Hastings College of Law's Startup Legal Garage program, which was founded in 2010 by Professor Robin Feldman.
Belonick serves as director of the Startup Legal Garage, an innovative program in which law students provide legal work for early stage tech and biotech startups. The work is supervised for free by outside law firms, while the professors teach accompanying doctrinal and skills classes. Every year, under Belonick’s direction, the law students and supervising attorneys take on 50-plus projects. Most of Startup Legal Garage’s companies come through the program's partnerships with numerous incubators and accelerators, including QB3, Y Combinator, Cyclotron Road, Tech Futures Group, HustleFund, Stanford Business School, Hackers/Founders, Women 2.0, Black Founders and more. With its particular focus on promoting women entrepreneurs, Startup Legal Garage has been honored by the Association of American Law Schools as one of its "Innovative & Other Outstanding Programs" and has been featured in the American Bar Association Journal and other news outlets.

As an attorney, Belonick has practiced at both small and internationally recognized firms in areas ranging from criminal and family law to mass torts and securities and business litigation. Belonick and the Startup Legal Garage help budding entrepreneurs – especially women, minority, disadvantaged, and veteran founders – turn groundbreaking ideas into growing, stable companies with the potential to reach millions with solutions for the world’s social, economic, health, and countless other problems. Belonick prides himself in helping early-stage startups that resolve problems through innovation throughout the nation. The programcharges no equity and no fees. The law students come from myriad backgrounds and work directly with founders. Over the years, Belonick and the Startup Legal Garage have launched founders whose work has won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, along with hundreds of companies with highly acclaimed products, services and solutions for the world’s biggest challenges. Among Belonick's important projects last year was his work helping early-stage companies seeking to provide more credit resources to underserved communities, cure cancer, provide residential solutions to tenants and landlords, and teaching law students.

FINALISTS

Teddy Low

Senior Deputy County Counsel
Office of County Counsel, L.A. County
University of Miami

Teddy Low, senior deputy county counsel, advises the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority (LAMetro) on its most significant rail procurements and construction projects.
He is responsible for legal issues related to construction of all major rail lines and for innovative project deliveries for large scale infrastructure projects, as well as early contractor involvement deliveries such as predevelopment agreement and construction manager general contractor models.
Among Low’s current projects is his work as counsel on the Sepulveda Transit Corridor Project, where LA Metro is making strides to improve travel between the San Fernando Valley, the Westside and LAX.
He also serves as counsel on the Link Union Station Project at Los Angeles Union Station and as counsel on the East San Fernando Light Rail Transit Project.
Before his work with LA Metro, which began in 2016, Low’s practice included serving as a city prosecutor, working as a trial attorney, and representing cities and public agencies.

Rachel Nosowsky

Deputy General Counsel –Health Affairs and Technology Law
University of California Office of the President
Carleton College

There are counsel who focus on protecting you from error. Others are committed to helping you achieve a goal. Then, there are a few, like Rachel Nosowsky, who take their knowledge in both domains to help design solutions. She is an outstanding resource and beacon for the leaders of the largest public health system in California, serving as an advocate for its challenging three-fold mission: providing access for all persons to the best clinical care; training the diverse California healthcare workforce of the future; and making discoveries so care across the state and nation is even better tomorrow than it is today. Nosowsky joined UC Legal – Office of the General Counsel in 2010.
She specializes in the area of research and clinical trials, with a focus on human research protections, FDA regulation, industry-academic relations and related fraud and abuse and conflict of interest matters, reimbursement, health privacy, biobanking, data repositories, compliance and misconduct.

Elspeth Paul

Deputy General Counsel
Cedars-Sinai
Health System
UC Berkeley School of Law

Elspeth Paul is the deputy general counsel of Cedars-Sinai Health System.
She is an expert in healthcare business transactions and hospital operations, as well as Stark, anti-kickback, corporate practice of medicine and tax-exemption rules. Prior to joining Cedars-Sinai, Paul was the general counsel of Verity Health System, formerly the Daughters of Charity Health System. Verity consisted of six hospitals in California, a state-wide physician network, multiple provider joint ventures and an offshore self-insurance trust. In 2018, Verity filed for Chapter 11 protection. During her tenure, Paul led the organization through what (at the time) was the largest healthcare bankruptcy in U.S. history. She successfully completed multiple hospital sales under Section 363 and prevailed in litigation with the California Attorney General. She spent many years at law firms, as a partner with Hooper, Lundy & Bookman, and an associate with Latham & Watkins, before transitioning to in-house with Dignity Health, where she was associate general counsel.

Jessica Zetley

General Counsel
Casa Pacifica Centers for Children and Families
University of Wisconsin

Casa Pacifica is a residential treatment facility and off-campus provider of services to abused, neglected, mentally ill and emotionally disturbed children in Ventura and Santa Barbara Counties. As its general counsel, Jessica Zetley runs the agency’s legal and compliance function, protects it against third-party claims and predatory wage and hour litigation, works hard to maintain Casa Pacifica’s strict compliance with licensing regulations in a highly-regulated environment, and recently guided the agency through construction of a recent major expansion of its campus. As if that weren’t enough, Zetley has also been instrumental in advising Casa Pacifica’s executive leadership in working through the incredibly challenging conditions created by COVID-19. She is a trusted advisor to Casa Pacifica’s CEO and board of directors, who perceive and are grateful for her passionate dedication both to the agency and, most importantly, to the children and families it serves.