Shayla Myers is the Director of Impact Litigation and Policy at the Legal Aid Foundation of Los Angeles. She oversees LAFLA’s strategic advocacy, which aims to address systemic disparities impacting low income people in Los Angeles.

Before taking on this role, she spent over ten years at LAFLA fighting to protect the civil rights of unhoused residents and to prevent the criminalization of homelessness. Currently, she is lead counsel on a number of cases in state and federal court, including litigation challenging the constitutionality of public space regulations and represents unhoused residents in litigation brought by the business community against the City of Los Angeles.

Before joining LAFLA, she was a Skadden Fellow at the Los Angeles LGBT Center and then an associate at a Plaintiff’s side civil rights firm in Los Angeles. Shayla clerked for the Honorable Sandra Segal Ikuta on the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, and graduated from UCLA Law School, with concentrations in Public Interest Law and Policy and Critical Race Studies. Prior to going to law school, Shayla coordinated an advocacy program and hotline for sexual assault survivors in Albuquerque, New Mexico, where she grew up.

Shayla was the Margaret Levy Public Interest Fellow at UCLA School of Law in 2024 and received the Los Angeles Community Action Network’s Freedom Now award for her work on behalf of unhoused residents in 2018.