Class Notes

Hiramoto arrived at Berkeley Law during the tumultuous fight over tenure denials for two beloved professors — Eleanor Swift and Marjorie Shultz — and found both inspiring.

“I credit her with my understanding of contracts,” Hiramoto says of Shultz. “It was shocking that this incredibly smart and capable woman didn’t have the full support of the faculty when it came to tenure allegedly because her published works were in the area of family law.”

An East Bay native, Hiramoto practiced at McCutchen, Doyle, Brown & Enersen and the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission before then-Gov. Pete Wilson appointed her to the bench in 1998.

She became involved with the Center for Youth Development Through Law (CYDL), a mock trial and summer internship program for local high school students from low-income and underrepresented backgrounds. They come to Berkeley Law for courses incorporating critical thinking, communication skills, legal empowerment, and social justice, while spending four days a week at full-time law-related offices.

More than 95% of CYDL students attend college. Now the ex-officio chair of CYDL’s board, Hiramoto tries to foster the same encouraging mindset she had as a high school student in Richmond: Work hard and you can do anything.

“I see that happening in CYDL,” she says. “And that’s what I love, giving them the confidence that they are as good as anyone.”

Last year, Hiramoto was named Contra Costa County Trial Court Judge of the Year by the Alameda-Contra Costa Trial Lawyers Association. In 2024, she received the California Judges Association’s Bernard S. Jefferson Award for distinguished service in judicial education.

As the current dean of California’s B.E. Witkin Judicial College, which trains new state court jurists, she’s proud of recent additions to the curriculum — including a role-playing workshop on socioeconomic fairness to recognize and deter bias against litigants with limited resources.

A judge might read a defendant who fails to complete free, court-mandated Alcoholics Anonymous meetings as lazy or disrespectful, Hiramoto says. But that person might need to work long hours to avoid eviction, or lack a means of transportation. Shifting the viewpoint better equips judges to be truly fair.

“A driving theme that’s propelled me through my legal career is that government abuse is not going to happen on my watch,” says Hiramoto, whose grandparents, parents, and other family members were interned during World War II. “For me, one of the best ways to ensure justice everywhere is to educate judges about explicit and implicit bias, to be aware of it, and figure out how to deal with it.

“The theme of the college was Justitia Omnibus, ‘Justice for All.’ I hope new judges will intentionally plan how they’re going to make that real in their own courtrooms.” — Gwyneth K. Shaw

Dobrygowski now leads the cybersecurity legal function at Sophos, a global company that protects businesses against ransomware, phishing, and malware. International think tanks and major publications have featured his work on digital trust, cyber risk, and digital democracy, and he has advised worldwide organizations that oversee technology.

Named one of the 100 most influential leaders in corporate governance by the National Association of Corporate Directors, Dobrygowski also counseled tech sector clients as a corporate lawyer in San Francisco and Washington, D.C. His new book, Technology Governance: Build Trust in Digital Innovation, offers practical tools to help business leaders smartly mitigate risk and build trustworthy innovation.

“They’ve been trapped into a go-along-to-get-along mentality around tech, just adopting the opinions of venture capitalists whose incentives are very different from most businesses and most people,” he says. “It doesn’t have to be that way.”

Teaching in urban Paterson, N.J., after college, Dobrygowski saw his low-income students getting left behind the internet wave.

“As I came to understand how social and legal structures combine to create or deny opportunity, the law started to feel like the most powerful tool available to address some of the problems I’d seen,” he says.

He chose Berkeley Law partly for its commitment to help regular people “have a voice in shaping the laws and expectations that should guide how new technologies are developed.”

At the Berkeley Technology Law Journal, Dobrygowski got a jump on issues the world is now catching up to — privacy, misinformation, cybersecurity, and consumer protection — and how they collide with fast developing technologies.

Today, he laments the growing gap between a small group deciding which technologies get built and what they’re allowed to do, and everyone else operating in the world that creates.

“There’s a real threat to the kind of entrepreneurship that helps working class people build more stable lives,” he says. “There’s also a risk that to compete, every business — since they all have to adopt new technologies — will get caught up in a logic of irresponsibility and accelerate worse outcomes for both individuals and society.”

His book highlights how lawyers play a key role in holding tech developers accountable, and in helping companies responsibly spur innovation and long-term growth. The ways tech has damaged the rule of law in recent years aren’t an inevitable feature of computers, the internet, or AI, Dobrygowski argues, but rather the product of choices about how they may be used.

“Technology touches every part of society, so every part of society must have a say in what choices are available to the people who build it,” he says. “That is what good governance makes possible.” — Andrew Cohen

“I thought my impact would come from advising founders who were building the next big thing,” she says. “As it turned out, Berkeley Law gave me the education, the experience, and the courage that I’d eventually use to build a company with my co-founder.”

That company, rubi, is helping new transactional lawyers get ahead of the curve through a unique virtual apprenticeship platform. Its participants take on the role of a Big Law junior associate with step-by-step guidance through every task, decision, and document of a comprehensive megadeal using digestible online units that fit into busy schedules.

Before launching rubi in November 2025, Jerath and co-founder Madison Keeble, her former colleague at Norton Rose Fulbright, drew on lessons from their 25,000-plus billable hours to carefully craft the template.

“We believed there was a way to take the knowledge, skills, and understanding junior corporate lawyers usually spend years piecing together and teach it all upfront,” Jerath says. “As remote work and AI were beginning to reshape legal practice, we wanted the apprenticeship model to evolve alongside it.”

A full year of pilot testing on undergrads, law students, and attorneys ranging from their first to 10th year made sure the program truly worked.

“Once we were seeing pre-law students in our pilot producing stronger work product than junior lawyers in Big Law, we knew we were ready to launch,” Jerath says.

Former president of the University of Texas Senate of College Councils and Berkeley Law’s Startup Law Initiative, Jerath was named among Best Lawyers’ Ones to Watch in America for Mergers & Acquisitions Law and Project Finance Law each of the past two years. She says rubi’s core philosophy is that junior lawyers shouldn’t have to spend years piecing together how to practice law — and the early reviews are affirming.

Even before rubi’s public launch the University of Texas, where Jerath and Keeble were undergrads, sponsored access for the entire law school. Over 300 students are completing the program, and attorneys and students at other law schools are purchasing it on their own.

“The thing that I found most useful was the depth of the lesson videos,” 2L Vikram Joshi says. “I really appreciated that Geetika and Madison took the time to explain why they were writing things in certain ways, and why different partners may prefer different methods.”

3L Emily Wood liked how “instead of teaching skills in isolation, rubi walked me through a full sample M&A deal from start to finish so every task, every document, every decision lives inside the bigger picture.”

Last semester, Jerath spoke with students in Berkeley Law Professor Ofer Eldar’s Venture Capital Law and Finance class and joined Keeble in talking to the Leadership Academy student cohort. She credits the school for providing hands-on transactional experience right away, “something most law schools don’t offer 1Ls,” she notes.

“I wanted to make a meaningful impact in the world, and Berkeley Law felt like a place where I’d be surrounded by people who wanted to do the same,” Jerath says. “I was right.” — Andrew Cohen

President of his high school class before attending Harvard and Harvard Law, he clerked for U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sherman Minton, served as an Air Force lieutenant and lawyer, and practiced law in Washington, D.C., and Boston before joining Berkeley Law’s faculty in 1961.

A skilled teacher whose Constitutional Law, Torts, and Legal Ethics classes were exceedingly popular, Cole was a First Amendment expert who actively supported students during UC Berkeley’s Free Speech Movement in 1964. He helped persuade campus leadership to let them assemble and express their views, and drafted guidelines that other universities used as a template.

Cole took emeritus status in 1993, but served as J.D. Program Associate Dean from 1997 to 1998 soon after Proposition 209 banned affirmative action across state government institutions, preventing UC schools from factoring race into student admissions and financial aid. His successful approach to restore minority enrollment, consistent with the law, gained wide praise.

Married for 44 years to fellow Berkeley Law Professor Eleanor Swift before she died in 2023, Cole was celebrated during a memorial service at the law school Aug. 21.

After serving in the U.S. Army from 1963 to 1969, he became a deputy district attorney for Contra Costa County and a U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission staff attorney. Hallisey later opened the Law Offices of Hallisey and Johnson in San Francisco, focusing on California energy and labor law.

Ever civic-minded, he served on the University of California Board of Regents, California Board of Forestry and Fire Protection, California Transportation Commission, California Economic Development Commission, California State Coastal Conservancy, and California Construction Industry Labor Management Cooperation Trust — among other community organizations.

Hallisey also acted as a mentor for numerous younger lawyers, deftly brought people together over complicated policy issues, served as Gov. Jerry Brown’s campaign adviser, and continually helped advance meaningful reforms in California.