Zal K. Shroff is proud to serve as the Interim Legal Director at LCCRSF, where he litigates impact cases, spearheads local and statewide advocacy campaigns, and supervises a program staff of 15-20 advocates working on immigrant, economic, and racial justice. Zal has dedicated his professional career to fighting for civil rights across the United States—serving as a lead attorney on more than two dozen civil rights cases in state and federal courts across the country spanning issues of poverty discrimination, First Amendment protest/political speech, race and religious discrimination, police and prosecutorial accountability, conditions of confinement, and voting rights.

Zal’s significant impact litigation victories include: Debt Collective v. Judicial Council of California, a case against the California courts for running a profit scheme that extracted hundreds of millions of dollars from low-income Californians; Coalition on Homelessness v. City and County of San Francisco, securing an injunction against San Francisco’s draconian practice of policing homeless residents who have committed no crime but sleeping in public amidst the City’s massive affordable housing shortage; Loud Light v. Schwab, an action ordering the Kansas Secretary of State to disclose the information of 30,000 voters disenfranchised every election; Cole v. Goossen, emergency litigation on behalf of student protestors resulting in major reform to protest policies at the Kansas Capitol.

Before joining LCCRSF as a Senior Staff Attorney, Zal held a position as a Clinical Lecturer at Yale Law School where he worked with students on litigation and advocacy projects that addressed conditions of confinement and voting rights for incarcerated individuals. Zal first cut his teeth into litigation with the amazing team at the ACLU of Kansas, where he served as a staff attorney for two years and worked on several proactive, organizer-led social justice campaigns. Zal began his career as the Clifford Chance Foundation Fellow at the Vera Institute of Justice, where he served as an advisor on in-house corporate governance matters and developed expertise on state-level funding for college in prison programs nationwide.

Zal graduated from Columbia Law School, where he took a lead role in excessive force and parole release cases for incarcerated individuals in New York’s state and federal prisons. He is also a graduate of Brown University, majoring in Latin while pursuing classical vocal performance as another major discipline.

Zal is admitted to practice in New York, Connecticut, Kansas, and California (legal-aid license), and is also admitted to the federal bar in the Ninth and Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals, the District of Connecticut, and the District of Kansas.