Olivia Batist

Olivia Batist is a Fellow at Arias Sanguinetti Trial Lawyers in the firm’s Southern California office. A recent college graduate, Olivia brings particularly strong research and information-management experience to the fellowship. As an Expert Witness Research Assistant, she has conducted country-conditions research related to political persecution, drawing from reports by international organizations, nongovernmental organizations, and legal sources to support work involving an asylum proceeding. She has also analyzed testimony and supporting documentation to help develop factual narratives connecting an individual’s experiences with broader documented patterns of political repression.

Her interest in human rights extends beyond individual research projects. As a founding team member of Political Prisoner Watch, Olivia has helped develop organizational structures and research processes supporting work on political imprisonment and human rights. Her responsibilities have included conducting research, developing relationships with researchers, journalists, legal practitioners, and human rights organizations, and mentoring student contributors conducting work related to countries including Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, Armenia, and Georgia.

Olivia’s research experience is also highly analytical. As an economics research assistant, she collected and organized information from hundreds of job postings and taught herself Stata to clean and analyze thousands of data points examining compensation and hiring trends. Earlier work in policy, communications, and nonprofit organizations gave her additional experience conducting long-term research, evaluating programs, preparing reports, and translating large amounts of information into findings that organizations could actually use.

Across these experiences, Olivia has developed a particular interest in the operational side of research and legal work. She enjoys creating order within complicated information — organizing documents, tracking data, developing workflows, maintaining records, and synthesizing research into formats that allow other members of a team to use it efficiently. Even her experience working in an academic library, where she managed research materials and digitized archival documents, contributed to the precision and organizational approach she now brings to legal work.

Through the Arias Sanguinetti fellowship, Olivia is learning how those skills translate to plaintiff-side litigation. She is focused on gaining a practical understanding of case development, strengthening her legal research and case-support abilities, and observing how attorneys and legal professionals transform large amounts of factual information into organized, usable materials. As a fellow, her role is centered on learning and professional development while she explores how her interests in research, systems, and human rights may inform the next stage of her career.

Olivia graduated from the University of Southern California with a bachelor’s degree in International Relations and Affairs.