Meet the New SCBA President, ANDI LIEBENBAUM

By Sean McCoy

After a few introductory remarks, Andi took the floor. Like someone lured into a time-share promotion, it was at that moment I knew that I was about to pay for the free pizza and prosecco I had been enjoying. Absent any other inducement of some prize just for listening, Andi enthusiastically pitched the merits of participating in the SCBA delegation – describing how it was both a worthwhile activity to affect change in the law, and a great opportunity to socialize with other attorneys with similar interests. But I am getting ahead of myself.

Almost as soon as Andi was moved, seconded, and passed unanimously into the world, I mean “born,” she was plunged into the legal field in the same manner a toddler with water wings is placed into a pool. Andi’s father, Larry, was an immigration attorney in Los Angeles with a unique view of childcare. Andi’s elementary school peers were struggling with red, blue, or green school readers, while Andi spent many of her afterschool hours sorting through pocket parts to Code books and practice guides. Andi complains about the wages: “When I was really young, my dad offered me a nickel per pocket part. Since nickels were bigger than dimes, I agreed, only to later realize…”. By junior high school, Andi was making a quarter per pocket part, which she ascribes to her excellent negotiating skills. Not content to allow Andi to confine her extra-curricular activities to the normal range of high school activities, Andi’s father brought her along to meetings of the Los Angeles Delegation and often to the conference itself.

All of this early exposure did not, at first, persuade Andi that the law was in her future. She had other interests beyond law and legislation. One of Andi’s early jobs before law school led her into racing. Specifically, racing solar cars. In Australia. While this idea conjures images of Andi as Maggie Dubois accompanying the Great Leslie in a race against an assortment of characters from a Mad Max movie with competitors racing through the Outback driving beat-up, solar panel bedazzled contraptions, this is a real thing. In 1987, General Motors’ first solar car, the Sunraycer, participated in the first-ever World Solar Challenge in Australia and won. General Motors (GM) hired Andi as a contractor to help promote the company’s solar car concept. Andi traveled the country for nearly two years transporting the Sunraycer to museums, GM manufacturing facilities, college campuses, and state fairs promoting the concept of a car that was powered by the sun. In 1990, she traveled to Australia as a principal race coordinator for the GM-sponsored teams. GM eventually donated the Sunraycer to the Smithsonian (Andi visits Sunraycer in the history of the automobile section of the National Museum of American History whenever she’s in DC).

But the sun set and Andi’s contract ended. She returned to the United States and enrolled in Loyola Law School in the fall of

1991. Just before finals near the end of her first year, the Los Angeles riot occurred in the aftermath of the verdict in the Rodney King case in which law enforcement officers were acquitted of using excessive force during a traffic stop that resulted in significant lasting harm to King, an African American man. Although the civil unrest began at an intersection seven miles south of school, over the next two days it expanded north into the neighbor- hoods around Loyola's downtown LA campus. Finals temporarily suspended, Andi, who lived in a community within the area under curfews and lockdowns because of the riots, organized and led fellow law students in volunteering with Los Angeles’s legal aid network, performing outreach and assisting with legal services to displaced renters, immigrants, and local business owners.

If you need more evidence that Andi was very involved in her school community, she joined and eventually served as president of both Loyola Law School’s Environmental Law Society and Women Lawyers. She was also elected vice president of the student bar association. She participated in an international legal scholars’ program traveling to Central America to study international environmental policy and the international protection of human rights. She was a volunteer in the early pilot program, Dependency Court Legal Services, and she served as a judicial extern to former Justice Margaret Grignon of the Second Appellate District. And, in 1994, in the aftermath of the Northridge earthquake, she again organized fellow students and volunteered to provide community-based and legal services to hundreds of displaced people. While it seems obvious, Andi brashly states that she loved law school. She said, “I was worried that I was doing something wrong because I wasn’t hating it. In fact, I loved law school. I got so much from the experience, and I still recommend it highly to people who are ‘law school curious.’”

Clearly, Andi wasn’t doing anything wrong because she graduated and was admitted to the California State Bar. She received the good news about passing on her 30th birthday. She says that her parents’ ploy to distract her from worry with dinner and tickets to the LA Philharmonic didn’t work, but fortunately she managed to get through on the State Bar’s phone line minutes before the performance. She laughs when she says, “Please don’t ask me what the performance was that night. You’d have to look it up.” Andi was delighted, and her father Larry couldn’t have been prouder. But rather than join her father’s immigration practice, Andi did two things. First, she became a conflict attorney with the Los Angeles Public Defender’s office handling delinquency matters. Next, she began working with community service non-profit organizations helping to develop programs for at-risk and high-risk youth and young adults. After a couple of heartbreaking cases trying to protect children in the system (she describes herself as having been a good shepherd in a bad system), Andi decided that her energy was better spent in non- profit leadership and management, a path she pursued throughout California and Latin America for nearly 20 years.

In 2006, Andi relocated to Sacramento. On a lark, Andi took a job with the legislature serving as a senior policy aide to then-Assemblymember Jared Huffman, one of the few attorneys in the legislature at the time. A few years later, Huffman was elected to Congress and Andi remained in Sacramento, taking a job with the Judicial Council of California where she worked until February of this year. You can now find Andi working on behalf of her “homeland,” the County of Los Angeles as a lobbyist for the Los Angeles County CEO.

So, what about the CCBA?

Throughout all this time, since before law school, Andi got and remained involved. She followed in her father’s footsteps and regularly participated as a delegate, first in Los Angeles and later in Sacramento, where she chaired the SCBA delegation from 2011 to 2019. She joined and chaired the CCBA’s resolutions committee and served on the CCBA board. She still serves as a special advisor to CCBA and is a vocal champion of SCBA’s delegation.

At the end of 2019, I concluded my term as SCBA President and handed the gavel to Shanāe Buffington. Andi became the SCBA Secretary-Treasurer for 2020. The year had barely begun when SC-

BA’s executive leadership was faced with the challenge of guiding the SCBA through the COVID pandemic. Over the next three years, facing significantly reduced staff and income, Andi has been a workhorse for the association, helping to manage and guide it to financial security and some renewed sense of normal. By way of example, with Andi’s leadership last year, the SCBA was able to host its first in-person Bench Bar Reception and Annual Meeting after a two-year hiatus.

As chair of the delegation, Andi was tireless and successful in her efforts to recruit new members and to herd the lawyers who continued to be involved. As part of SCBA’s executive committee over the last three years, she turned that energy toward managing the association while always looking for ways to motivate others to contribute in any way they could. Knowing she will ask, when you meet Andi, volunteer to help in some way. You could even ask her about joining the delegation. And thank her for the electric car. She may deny responsibility, but chalk that up to humility.