Ani Tutunjyan

Ani Tutunjyan is a Fellow at Arias Sanguinetti Trial Lawyers in the firm’s Northern California office. As an aspiring attorney, she is gaining hands-on exposure to plaintiff-side litigation across matters involving sexual assault, personal injury, motor vehicle accidents, and employment law. Her fellowship builds upon a background in sociolegal research, journalism, public policy, domestic violence advocacy, and access-to-justice work.

Her interest in the law is rooted in a desire to make a complicated legal system more understandable and accessible to the people who need it. She sees the legal system as one avenue through which people can seek relief after experiencing harm. She is particularly interested in helping bridge the gap between legal processes and the everyday people expected to navigate them.

Before joining Arias Sanguinetti, Ani gained direct experience with that challenge as a Legal Access Intern with JusticeCorps at Bay Area Legal Aid. She assisted self-represented litigants with housing and domestic violence civil matters, conducted legal research, and supported individuals completing court forms involving restraining orders, child custody, and housing disputes. The experience affirmed her interest in pursuing law and reinforced her belief that meaningful access to justice requires not only legal resources, but helping people understand how to use them.

Ani has also served as a research assistant at UC Berkeley School of Law, conducting legal and social research on domestic violence and issues including coercive control, criminalization of survivors, post-separation abuse, and duress defenses. Her work supported academic publications, policy recommendations, and trial testimony while allowing her to examine how legal systems respond to complicated circumstances in people’s lives.

That work also influenced Ani’s decision to pursue the fellowship at Arias Sanguinetti. After previously assisting people navigating their own domestic violence matters in smaller civil settings, she wanted to understand how advocacy for survivors operates within litigation. The firm’s work representing survivors of sexual assault particularly interested her and provides an opportunity to broaden both her understanding of survivor advocacy and her exposure to litigation before law school. Ani plans to attend law school and is considering a future practice involving sexual assault and related matters.

Ani’s approach to the law is also shaped by several years in journalism. As a reporter for The Daily Californian, she covered city government, student government, higher education, community affairs, and legal issues. She became particularly interested in government reporting and the role journalism can play in creating transparency. Reading dense public and legal documents and translating them into reporting that everyday readers could understand showed her an early connection between journalism and law: both can require finding the important information within something complicated and making it meaningful to the people affected by it.

She graduated from the University of California, Berkeley as a Regents’ and Chancellor’s Scholar with degrees in Legal Studies and Rhetoric and separate minors in Journalism and Public Policy. She was selected for Berkeley’s Legal Studies Honors Program, where she conducted original sociolegal research examining how California family court judges interpret and apply state law in domestic violence restraining order proceedings. Her research incorporated courtroom observations and interviews to explore the relationship between written law and how it is applied in people’s lives.

Fluent in Armenian, Ani describes herself professionally as dedicated, helpful, and someone others can depend on, while outside of work she considers herself outgoing and cheery. Away from her professional interests, she enjoys cooking, making ceramics, dancing, thrifting, and spending time with friends.