Meet Shounak: A Product of PAUSD

Shounak is a lawyer, mediator, father, and graduate of Palo Alto schools. As a lawyer, Shounak fights for people and their families in court, representing clients in civil rights, labor and employment, consumer fraud, elder abuse, whistleblower, sexual assault, and wrongful death actions. Shounak has been recognized for his work as a National Trial Lawyers Association’s Top 40 Under 40 inductee, as well as a Thomson Reuters’ Super Lawyers Rising Star for four years in a row.

A longtime practitioner of mindfulness meditation who has worked to increase mental health supports for lawyers, Shounak believes that strong advocacy must be balanced with compassion, thoughtfulness, and a desire to find common ground. As a mediator, Shounak helps parties in dispute reach a mutual resolution without having to resort to costly and stressful litigation.

Shounak knows firsthand, growing up in Palo Alto schools, that the strong foundation he built in PAUSD gave him the tools to effectively help others. But his path was not straightforward. Shounak was an underperforming student, constantly struggling to get good grades and engage in academics. Yet through high school and college he pursued his non-academic interests with a single-minded focus and passion. Whether it was filmmaking, journalism, app-design, or creative writing, Shounak gave his projects his all.

During Shounak’s law school orientation, a constitutional law professor opened his eyes to the capacity of lawyers to provide access to justice for people who have been wronged. Inspired, Shounak found his academics driven by passion for the first time in his life and quickly rose to the top of his class at the University of San Francisco School of Law, where he graduated cum laude.

Motivated to give back to the PAUSD community, Shounak ran for and was elected to the PAUSD school board in 2018. A young man without a child was a novel choice for school board, but the voters believed in Shounak and his vision for providing diverse supports to empower students to forge their own paths to success—just as he had.

Shounak met his wife Laura at Gunn High School, where they were both on the swim team. They have a two-year old daughter, Aarchi, and a second daughter due on election day. If Shounak is re-elected, Aarchi will start kindergarten in PAUSD near the end of his last term, fulfilling his original campaign goal of serving to build a better PAUSD by the time he had a child in the district.