About Pacyinz Lyfoung

Introduction

As an attorney who dabbled in many different fields during my hiatus from the practice of law, I take a holistic approach that is enhanced by the many skills and experiences I accumulated from my past work in nonprofit management, state government, philanthropy, and international project design and management.

As a community-based and movement attorney, I am thankful for the opportunities to work alongside communities and individuals who seek self-determination and economic development. I have embedded in organizations to address daily challenges and find legal and systemic solutions. I routinely visit my clients’ places of business or cooperatively-owned properties, and participate in their activities, to fully immerse in their environments and better understand their ecosystems. It has been a pleasure to sit in the offices or gathering rooms of people and communities and share knowledge and strategize together.

My greatest rewards and sense of success come from bike commuting in DC and seeing the businesses or affordable housing buildings that I worked with flourish with self-determination and economic well-being. Being licensed in DC, CA, and MN, places where I have community and family ties, I am also happy to visit with my long-distance clients and see them do well with the knowledge and tools we shared.

In addition to my commitment to empowering my clients, I also have a passion for sharing knowledge with my fellow attorneys. I routinely design and offer webinars and presentations. My goal is to build a stronger progressive legal network and find synergies to better support access to legal services and access to justice for our communities; in other words, so that we may better practice community-based lawyering and movement lawyering.

Finally, it matters that I am a French-born, Minnesota-grown, Hmong/Laotian/Asian American woman: the product of diaspora and cosmopolitan refugee/immigrant search for home when my parents’ world fell apart. Since the pandemic, my two Hmong American fellow women attorneys and my father passed: brushing so close to death, my law practice is a work of fearless love for the good life for all.

Areas of Expertise and Work

  • Cooperative Law

  • Small Business Law

  • Nonprofit Law

  • Organizational Development

  • Residential and Commercial Leases

  • Public Interest Intellectual Property (community/collective ownership and benefit sharing, basic trademarks and copyrights, global trade, traditional knowledge and benefit-sharing)

  • Global Health

  • Land Trusts

  • Food/Agriculture

  • Sociocratic Governance (1st level certification)

Affiliations

Other Activities

I am a poet who writes poetry as informal history, to document the experiences of my family, communities, the world we live in, and social justice work. I teach SEA poetry from time to time, the kind of classes I wish existed. Here are some links for my poetry life:

The Loft: Meet Teaching Artist Pacyinz Lyfoung

Four Poems by Pacyinz Lyfoung, The Mid-Atlantic Review

Three Poems: Tasting the Country that Could Have Been Mine; Too Blind to See Giants; We, the Hmong People, Journal of Southeast Asian-American Education and Advancement

The Day I Learned to Speak My Grandmother’s Tongue, Split This Rock