Zal is a Senior Staff Attorney on the Racial Justice team. Prior to joining LCCRSF, Zal was a Clinical Lecturer-in-Law at Yale Law School where he worked with students to improve ballot access for incarcerated individuals and supervised litigation against the federal Bureau of Prisons for its response to the pandemic. Before that, Zal was a Staff Attorney at the ACLU of Kansas where he worked on a variety of civil rights cases spanning conditions of confinement, prosecutorial/police accountability, voting rights, race and religious discrimination, and First Amendment issues. Immediately after law school, Zal was the Clifford Chance Foundation Fellow at the Vera Institute of Justice, where he worked on non-profit in-house regulatory and compliance matters, and spearheaded a project on accessing state financial aid dollars for college in prison programs nationwide. Zal is a graduate of Brown University and received his JD from Columbia Law School. He is admitted to practice in New York, Connecticut, and Kansas, and is an MJP Registered Legal Aid Attorney in the State of California.