Melanie Stephenson-Laws

Joy Stephenson-Laws is founding and managing partner of Stephenson, Acquisto & Colman (SAC), the healthcare industry’s premier litigation firm. In this role, Ms. Stephenson-Laws leads a diverse team of more than 100 professionals that includes attorneys, doctors, nurses, technology and healthcare provider operations specialists. This interdisciplinary approach to representing clients such as Stanford Medical Center, UCLA Medical Center and UC Irvine Medical Center has resulted in SAC’s recovering more than $1 billion for its clients while consistently receiving high marks for client satisfaction for innovations such as SACLINK, a proprietary, interactive, paperless document management system.

Ms. Stephenson-Laws, who earned a Bachelor of Arts from Loma Linda University and a Juris Doctor from Loyola University, has spent her entire legal career addressing public benefit issues with a special emphasis on healthcare. Prior to starting her own firm in 1989, which was subsequently joined by Vince Acquisto and George Colman to form SAC, Ms. Stephenson-Laws was a staff attorney at the U.S Department of Health and Human Services. She was also a supervising attorney at Inland Counties Legal Services where she specialized in healthcare litigation. She is a member of the American Bar Association, Consumer Attorneys of Los Angeles, California State Bar Association, U.S. District Court-Central/Eastern and the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals.

In addition to her role with SAC, Ms. Stephenson-Laws is committed to enhancing consumer health and positively impacting the healthcare industry, and this goes beyond her work as a healthcare attorney. Both her professional and personal lives have been dedicated to improving healthcare in the United States through consumer education, advocacy for healthcare providers and starting a healthcare-related philanthropy to encourage others to get involved in their communities.

As part of this commitment, she co-founded The Bili Project Foundation, a nonprofit organization that drives funding and research for identifying markers of biliary cancers. The foundation’s goal is to more effectively diagnose and treat biliary cancers, which are the leading cause of cancer deaths in the United States. She is co-founder and president of MoJo Marketing & Media, a company dedicated to developing ways for individuals and companies to give back to their communities through sports and entertainment. She has also worked to introduce golf to inner city kids in Jamaica and is active in several local area philanthropies. Ms. Stephenson-Laws is an avid golfer, who also enjoys tennis and traveling.