Ashlei Williams

Ashlei Williams is the Director of Marketing & Business Development at Arias Sanguinetti Trial Lawyers, based in the Southern California office. She leads the firm’s strategic marketing, brand growth, business development, and client acquisition initiatives. Working across the firm’s offices and practice areas, she develops integrated strategies designed to strengthen visibility, cultivate professional relationships, expand referral partnerships, and support sustainable firm growth.

Her role sits at the intersection of marketing, business development, and intake. In addition to leading the firm’s marketing function, Ashlei manages the intake team and works closely with its members to connect the firm’s growth strategy with the prospective-client experience. This collaboration is particularly important for referral leads and partnerships, where she helps develop processes for tracking opportunities, strengthening communication with referral partners, and ensuring the intake experience supports those relationships. She also works with intake on campaign integration, helping connect advertising and outreach efforts with the processes used to receive, evaluate, track, and understand the leads they generate.

Ashlei oversees high-level brand and marketing campaigns while managing external partners responsible for digital strategy, public relations, advertising, and multimedia production. Her work spans attorney and firm positioning, content strategy, paid campaigns, media opportunities, events, referral development, professional organizations, and other initiatives designed to expand the firm’s reach. She approaches these areas as interconnected parts of the firm’s broader growth strategy rather than separate marketing functions.

She joined Arias Sanguinetti at the ground level of its marketing department and helped build the infrastructure necessary to integrate marketing more fully into the firm. Her work has included standardizing workflows, formalizing brand standards, developing systems for managing projects and vendors, and strengthening collaboration among marketing, intake, attorneys, firm leadership, and other departments. As her role expanded into business development, she increasingly focused on translating visibility into relationships and creating more intentional connections among the firm’s marketing investments, referral network, professional presence, and client acquisition efforts.

Before entering legal marketing, Ashlei worked as a communications consultant, developing tailored marketing and communications strategies for clients across the public, private, nonprofit, and entertainment sectors. Her work included city mayors, reality television personalities, state government departments, and billion-dollar construction companies. Through digital strategy, media relations, brand development, and creative storytelling, she helped clients increase visibility and engagement and secured placements in outlets including The Business Journals, EBONY, and the Chicago Defender.

Ashlei also brings extensive business-to-business (B2B) communications experience from her work with a national magazine serving the plumbing trade, where she advanced through leadership roles and gained firsthand insight into how professional industries build communities and influence. Her work developing recognition programs, webinars, livestreamed events, educational programming, and conference initiatives strengthened her understanding of relationship-based marketing and professional engagement. Today, she applies that experience to legal business development, with a particular focus on building relationships within trial lawyer associations and creating opportunities for attorneys to develop meaningful connections beyond traditional marketing channels.

She is a member of American Association for Justice (AAJ), Consumer Attorneys of California (CAOC), Consumer Attorneys Association of Los Angeles (CAALA). Her commitment to relationship-building and community engagement extends beyond her work at the firm. She is active in The Links, Incorporated and Delta Sigma Theta Sorority, Inc., and was previously a member of The Junior League. Her leadership experience includes serving on the Board of Directors for Girls Inc. of Memphis, where she co-chaired the Fund Development Committee, and on the Advisory Board of Loo-Sha, where she currently chairs the Marketing Committee. These organizations reflect her commitment to community engagement, servant leadership, and using communications to advance an organization’s mission.

Ashlei earned her M.S. in Journalism from the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University and her B.A. in English from Spelman College. Outside of work, Ashlei enjoys singing, live music and the performing arts, sightseeing throughout Los Angeles, and spending time at the beach.