Coco Su helps expand access to justice throughout California
In early May, Coco Su received a letter from the State Bar of California. It relayed much-anticipated and welcome news: SmartLaw, the Los Angeles County Bar Association’s lawyer referral service, had been approved to expand into central and Northern California.
“We were originally authorized to operate in five counties in Southern California, but we’ve now been cleared to serve an additional 47 counties—reaching the vast majority of California’s counties,” says Su, the director of SmartLaw. “It’s an unprecedented scale for a certified lawyer referral service in the state.”
“This has been a goal I’ve worked incredibly hard toward, and it’s a major milestone that will help us expand access to justice for more Californians across the state,” she adds.
This is just the latest achievement for Su, who has worked with SmartLaw for more than a decade. She has been the driving force behind many of its efforts to increase access to justice for underserved communities and low-to-moderate income consumers.
In October, the ABA Standing Committee on Lawyer Referral and Information Service honored Su with its Cindy A. Raisch Award. The award—named for the past chair of the standing committee and directing attorney of the Los Angeles County Bar Association’s lawyer referral service—celebrates innovation in public service-oriented lawyer referral and information programs.
Seth Chavez, another past director of the Los Angeles County Bar Association’s lawyer referral service, nominated Su for the award.
“Ms. Su’s contributions to advancing access to justice within the context of a lawyer referral service have not only been of great impact to SmartLaw, but many of the extraordinarily innovative programs she has developed and worked on have been modeled by other organizations to advance their access to justice efforts,” according to Chavez, who is now the executive director of the San Fernando Valley Bar Association.
Innovating programs and policies
As a kid, Su was fascinated by international relations and wanted to be an ambassador or a foreign service officer.
Su, who was born in Taiwan, first came to the United States as an exchange student when she was 15 years old. She went to high school in Alabama for a year, went home for a year and then returned to the United States. She took classes at a community college in Seattle before transferring to Indiana University, where she graduated with her bachelor’s degree in political science in 2006.
Su went back overseas, where she worked on a sustainable fishing campaign for Greenpeace Southeast Asia and for a global container freight company. By that time, she decided not to pursue a career in foreign policy, but she was interested in law.
Su moved to Los Angeles in 2012. She joined the Los Angeles County Bar Association the following year to help SmartLaw better support Mandarin-speaking immigrants who needed legal assistance.
“I started as an interviewer, as an intake specialist,” says Su, who is fluent in Taiwanese and Mandarin. “And from there, I was in pretty much every position there is in the lawyer referral service.”
As Su moved up in the association, she worked to better serve members of the public by implementing innovative programs to meet their diverse needs. These programs targeted low-income clients and clients of modest means and offered flexible fee arrangements and flat fees.
“There was a gap there, and I knew I could help those clients by creating different programs to connect them to attorneys,” says Su, who became SmartLaw’s manager of administrative operations in 2015. “That was the starting point for me.”
Su created an incubator program that connects young lawyers with opportunities to gain experience and make a positive impact in underserved communities. She also developed a program with the Mexican American Bar Association to increase access to legal representation for California’s Spanish-speaking community.
Su was SmartLaw’s business development manager from 2019 to 2024. During this time, she helped launch what she refers to as one of the first programs in the country to provide “low-bono” legal services to cannabis industry entrepreneurs who have prior cannabis convictions.
Among other initiatives, Su leads a program ensuring that minors who appear in Los Angeles County’s juvenile dependency court have competent and efficient legal representation. Of all the programs that she supervises, she says this one is especially meaningful.
“It deals with children in some of the most vulnerable, heartbreaking situations imaginable,” Su says. “The county reached out to me to help find legal representation for these cases—because they’re very difficult to place. These aren’t just referrals; they require real strategy, persuasion and persistence.”
‘Bold creativity’
Coco Su lives in Los Angeles with her husband, Michael, and their 17-year-old Yorkshire terrier, Mo.Su became the interim director and then director of SmartLaw in 2024. Even before stepping into this role, Su managed SmartLaw’s core operations, including membership growth, revenue generation and collections. She notes that she personally developed and implemented new collections policies for SmartLaw, which accepts 15% of the fees generated by its referrals.
Su also has helped drive business opportunities for the nearly 5,000 law firms that participate in the lawyer referral service. According to the Los Angeles County Bar Association, she has helped facilitate more than $100 million in attorney fees during her time with SmartLaw.
“The longer I was in this industry, I realized what we actually need is somebody who has a business mind,” says Su, who earned her master of business administration degree from the Pepperdine Graziadio Business School in 2023. “I thought having a business degree would be the best for [SmartLaw]. Essentially, it is a business.”
Michael Sacchetto, the vice chair of the Los Angeles County Bar Association’s lawyer referral service advisory committee, describes Su’s work with SmartLaw as “nothing short of transformative.” In addition to broadening its reach, Sacchetto says Su now is working to increase efficiency through new tools, including artificial intelligence-assisted phone-answering platforms.
“In a constantly shifting legal landscape, Coco’s blend of bold creativity and fiscal stewardship is positioning SmartLaw to grow smarter, faster and farther than we ever imagined,” says Sacchetto, a founding partner of Hanning & Sacchetto in Whittier, California.
Su’s other plans for SmartLaw include partnering with more government agencies and bar associations in the future. As a nonlawyer, she is an affiliate member of the ABA. She will speak on several panels at the Standing Committee on Lawyer Referral and Information Service’s National Lawyer Referral Workshop in October in Atlanta.
“Every day I think about ways to get to more clients, to get to more members and to generate more revenues for the bar and for the attorneys,” says Su, who lives in Los Angeles with her husband, Michael, and their 17-year-old Yorkshire terrier, Mo. “I’m very passionate about expanding. I think that has always been my goal.”
Members Who Inspire is an ABA Journal series profiling exceptional ABA members. If you know members who do unique and important work, you can nominate them for this series by emailing [email protected].
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