Pat Levy-Lavelle

Pat Levy-Lavelle is Senior Intake Attorney at Legal Aid Justice Center in Richmond.  Since coming to Legal Aid Justice Center in 2005, Pat has done individual representation and impact advocacy on a wide range of topics, including workers’ rights, tenants’ rights and public housing policy issues, and the disproportionate impact of court debt (fines and fees) on low-income people in Virginia.

Pat participated in the successful multi-year campaign that ended Virginia’s unconstitutional use of driver’s license suspensions for unpaid court debt, which had deprived over 977,000 people of their licenses.  On unemployment insurance, Pat’s work (including individual representation of claimants, administrative advocacy, public education, litigation, and legislative advocacy) contributed to Virginia unfreezing benefits (totaling more than $1.058B) to approved claimants awaiting hearings during the pandemic, and to the passage of Virginia’s temporary unemployment insurance overpayment waiver process (which has helped to forgive more than $258M in debt to unemployed workers who lack the ability to repay benefits they also received without fault).

Pat graduated from Carleton College in 1999, and received his law degree from the University of Virginia in 2005.