Gautam Jagannath

Gautam Jagannath is a leading innovator and founding director of Social Justice Collaborative. Gautam was certified by the State Bar of California as an Immigration & Nationality Law expert. Gautam has always been passionate about defense law. He attended Northeastern University School of Law, the nation’s leading public interest law school, with the goal of becoming a public defender. However, after noticing the impact of criminal law on low-income immigrants, Gautam was drawn to the intersection between criminal and immigration law.  Struck by the lack of access to counsel for immigrants, he believed that forming SJC was a natural next step toward alleviating the lack of legal services for low-income noncitizen. As SJC is working toward becoming the immigration public defender, Gautam strives to increase representation for both detained and non-detained individuals.

Gautam is an adjunct professor at University of San Francisco’s Masters in Migratory Studies program and sits on the Board of Directors for the Bay Area chapter of the National Lawyers Guild and the South Asian Bar Association. He is an active part of various progressive legal movements. Gautam speaks Spanish and Tamil. He is a member of the California Bar, the Northern District of California, the Central District of California, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, and the Supreme Court of the United States.

Gautam also is an alumnus from the One Justice Executive Fellowship Program.

Project Description

The Roddenberry Fellowship project is a total technological overhaul of our client management system using top notch AI automation and algorithms to overhaul mundane and routine administrative tasks which dominate the time commitment involved in civil rights litigation, especially immigration defense.  The end result would be a new way to interface with clients from the intake to case completion, and the use of high level technology to reduce the costs involved with representing more immigrants and refugees in deportation proceedings. The project will involve working with a team of back-end engineers and data scientists to alter the way data flows through the organization, and to improve the architecture of the way staff interface with the program.