Makaiya Bullitt-Rigsbee
Attorney
Makaiya’s practice is focused on the representation of indigent clients of color in dependency and removal hearings.
During her time as an undergraduate, she attended the Gallatin School of Individualized Study at New York University, where she majored in human rights and literature. She went on to earn a M.Phil. with distinction in postcolonial literature from Trinity College Dublin for her thesis on the political and aesthetic nexus within Vladimir Nabokov’s work.
She next graduated from Harvard Law School in 2019 with a special recognition for public service after working with refugees in Cape Town, South Africa for the Legal Resources Centre and being a summer fellow at the Equal Justice Initiative in Montgomery, Alabama. She practiced as a public defender both in law school and afterwards, and is now concurrently pursuing a PhD from Stanford University in order to further study the regulation of color in the American episteme.
A lifelong devotee of art, literature, ethics and the deconstruction of the law, she lives in Seattle with her husband, daughters and two kittens.
Michael L. Thomas, Jr.
Of Counsel
Michael’s work with Nemos Law supports the firm’s representation of parents and families in dependency proceedings through complex legal research, written advocacy and case strategy. Drawing on his experience in federal trial and appellate courts, he brings particular attention to questions of due process, evidence, procedure and the preservation of issues for review.
Michael attended Princeton University as an undergraduate where he studied sociology and produced scholarship on racial authenticity in the music industry and on the labor and immigration-policy dimensions of domestic work. After Princeton, he taught history and worked in New York City government to expand minority- and women-owned businesses’ access to capital and public contracting.
Michael graduated from Harvard Law School in 2019, where he served as President of the Harvard Law Review and represented indigent clients through the Criminal Justice Institute. He clerked for Judge Colleen McMahon of the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York and Judge Barrington D. Parker, Jr. of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit before practicing at Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz on complex litigation, investigations and appeals. He is admitted to practice in New York where he leads an independent practice devoted to litigation strategy, investigations and sophisticated legal writing.
A lifelong devotee of music, history, entrepreneurship and building healthier ways for people to gather, he lives in Brooklyn with his family and leads Positive Deviance NYC, an arts-and-culture organization centered on expanding access to live programming and clean-air infrastructure.