How Marissa Roy plans to transform the L.A. city attorney’s office – Los Angeles Times

How Marissa Roy plans to transform the L.A. city attorney’s office  Los Angeles Times

For more than a year, Marissa Roy has vowed to turn the Los Angeles city attorney's office into a massive "public interest law firm." Now, she has a sweeping mandate to put that plan into action. As of Wednesday morning, Roy had nearly double the vote tally of her opponent, L.A. County Deputy Dist. Atty. John McKinney, all but assuring the 34-year-old progressive will walk into City Hall in one of her jewel-toned blazers next year as Los Angeles' chief lawyer. While the contest has not officially been called, McKinney effectively conceded the race in an interview with The Times on Wednesday. For decades, the L.A. city attorney's office has focused almost exclusively on prosecuting minor crimes and defending the city from increasingly expensive litigation.

In an interview in May, outgoing City Atty. Hydee Feldstein Soto scowled when a reporter mentioned Roy's campaign line about running the office as a "public interest law firm." "That's insane," Feldstein Soto said, days before her historic primary defeat. But in Roy, an enthusiastic and tenacious California deputy attorney general, the city will have a proactive top litigator who's ready to play offense. Roy has promised to take her experience from a years-long legal battle with Meta to aggressively pursue litigation against corporations and landlords for alleged misconduct that harms the average Angeleno. Long