Public Lawyer Spotlight: Suzanne Ambrose, State Personnel Board Executive Officer

• Publication year: 2020

PUBLIC LAWYER SPOTLIGHT: SUZANNE AMBROSE, STATE PERSONNEL BOARD EXECUTIVE OFFICER

Ms. Ambrose's public service career spans over 30 years at five different departments in the State of California. During that time, she's been a consistent force in enhancing civil rights; finding ways to make change within existing resources and partnering with others.

TELL US ABOUT YOUR CAREER PATH.

I made the decision to become a lawyer in 1981 after seeing a double feature of "Kramer vs. Kramer" and "And Justice for All" at the old Village Theater in Sacramento for one dollar, which is funny to me now since movie theaters don't show double features for a dollar anymore and I don't practice either family law or criminal law.

My undergraduate majors were history and sociology, and I decided to become a civil rights attorney after studying the civil rights movement in college. I come from a long line of public servants and knew that I wanted to work in government. The Department of Fair Employment and Housing (DFEH) was the perfect fit.

When I was in my third year of law school, the DFEH office moved from San Francisco to Sacramento, so I contacted the Assistant Chief Counsel and volunteered to be a law clerk. The experience was more than I had hoped, and within a few months, I was drafting pleadings and conducting administrative hearings alongside the staff attorneys. When the bar results came out in November 1987, I received a call from the DFEH Assistant Chief Counsel asking me to apply for a staff attorney job with them.

I started at DFEH in 1988, and worked as a staff attorney for four years until the Gulf War broke out, decimating the state budget and forcing layoffs. Since I was the least senior attorney, my position was being eliminated. State attorneys have extremely good job protection, and when targeted for layoff, they go onto a State Restrictions of Appointment (SROA) list, which gives them hiring priority for any attorney vacancy throughout state government. I was picked up by the Attorney General's Office, Criminal Law Division, and for the next two years, I wrote over 75 appellate briefs, argued in the Courts of Appeal half a dozen times, and wrote a California Supreme Court brief. While I have always appreciated my appellate experience, my real passion was in civil rights enforcement. So when things stabilized, I went back to DFEH and, for the next 6 years, worked as the Assistant Chief Counsel and then the Chief Counsel.

When Bill Lockyer became the Attorney...