Emil Pacelli
Emil Pacelli is not the kind of paralegal who went looking for a corner office and a silk tie. When it came time to choose where he would learn this craft, he didn’t run to a gleaming firm that bills by the hour and measures people in dollars. He went to the Public Defender’s Office—into the trenches—where the poor, the addicted, the broken, and the forgotten come in chained at the wrists and ankles, and where almost no one else is lining up to help them.
There, Emil learned what this work really is: sitting eye-to-eye with people the world has written off and saying, “Your story matters. I’m listening.” That is where he found his calling, and he has carried that with him into his work as a Criminal Law Paralegal at The Mulligan Defense.
Emil brings more than three years of deep, hands-on experience in criminal defense, discovery management, and trial preparation. Armed with a B.A. in Sociology with a Minor in Public Affairs from UCLA and an ABA-approved Paralegal Certificate from UCLA Extension, along with training in Westlaw, eDiscovery platforms, and advanced legal research, he has the formal tools to match the fire in his gut.
But paper credentials are only the bones of the story. What really matters is the work he does on his cases.
In an attempted murder case at The Mulligan Defense, the official story was neat and tidy on paper: a violent client, a righteous victim, a clean police report. Emil didn’t buy it. Going disc by disc through hours of audio and video, he uncovered lies buried in the police report and pieced together what really happened—that the shooting was an act of self-defense. He drafted a detailed report laying out the truth so clearly that, when the prosecution read it, their case crumbled. They folded.
In another case, buried in a dry transcript that most people would skim past, Emil caught a single line from an alleged rape victim: “I’ve been through this before.” Most would have let it go. Emil tugged on that thread. His follow-up uncovered that this person had previously made a false accusation. That quiet discovery changed the entire landscape of the case.
This is Emil’s gift: he listens for the one sentence that doesn’t fit, the one detail that smells wrong, the one human truth hiding behind a stack of “official” paperwork. He organizes chaos, builds structure out of mess, and does it without losing his humanity. Clients know him as the calm in the storm; colleagues know him as the one who keeps the train on the tracks when the stakes are highest.
Over the long term, Emil’s dream is not to stop at being a paralegal. He is on the road to becoming an attorney himself. His heart is set not on representing the powerful, but on standing with “the least of our brothers”—the people everyone else has decided are expendable. He wants to be the lawyer who walks into a courtroom not as part of the machine, but as its challenger, carrying the stories of the damned and the discarded and demanding that they be heard.
At The Mulligan Defense, Emil doesn’t just support the work. He strengthens its spine. He reminds us, case after case, that justice doesn’t begin in the courtroom. It begins with someone like Emil, sitting at a desk, reading the thing everyone else missed, and quietly choosing to fight for the human being on the other end of the file.
