Gina Zapanta

Gina Zapanta is a Partner/Attorney at Alder Law, PC, in Sherman Oaks, California, and the co-founder of Z.A. Lawyers, a California firm dedicated to the rights of injured workers. A member of the State Bar of California and a 2007 graduate of Loyola Law School, she has spent her career advocating for employees and injured people in the Los Angeles area.

Zapanta’s interest in law grew in part from her late father, Dr. Richard Zapanta, a prominent orthopedic surgeon and first-generation Latino who was deeply committed to philanthropy in East Los Angeles. As an undergraduate at the University of Southern California, where she earned a bachelor’s degree with a double major in psychology and international relations and a minor in Spanish, she took a summer job with family friend and personal injury lawyer Greg Moreno.

After college, Zapanta provided investor relations support for the founding of ProAmerica Bank, the first Latino-owned bank in the Los Angeles area, working in the office of founder and executive chair Maria Contreras-Sweet, who later led the U.S. Small Business Administration. She also worked for the chief of staff at the private equity firm The Yucaipa Companies. A year after college she enrolled at Loyola Law School, where she earned her Juris Doctor in 2007. She completed a judicial externship with Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Teresa Sanchez-Gordon and is admitted to the State Bar of California.

Rather than follow a traditional legal path, Zapanta returned to the family business, taking over the business side of her father’s orthopedic surgery practice and expanding it significantly. Drawing on her knowledge of law and lawyers, she shifted the practice toward caring for injured patients referred by personal injury lawyers and chiropractors who relied on medical liens for payment. In 2012 she founded the Los Angeles Center for Orthopedics, a lien-based concierge medical service provider, and she has served as administrator of Eastside Orthopedic Medical Associates, which runs an orthopedic surgery clinic, a multi-specialty outpatient surgery center and a physical therapy center. Her expertise covers contracting, health care management and personal injury strategic partnership development between physicians and attorneys.

In 2020, after nearly 14 years building that business, Zapanta co-founded Z.A. Lawyers with Michael Alder, a Los Angeles plaintiffs’ trial lawyer who is now her husband. The two started the firm to represent injured workers and workers’ compensation claimants they believed were often poorly served. She is also a Partner/Attorney at Alder Law, PC, in Sherman Oaks, California.

Zapanta served two terms as an appointed trustee on the Board of Retirement of the Los Angeles County Employees Retirement Association (LACERA), appointed by the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors, where she adjudicated injured workers’ claims. In November 2023, the California Insurance Commissioner appointed her to the California Organized Investment Network (COIN) Commission.

She serves on the Board of Directors of LMU Loyola Law School, which advises the dean, and on the boards of trustees of White Memorial Hospital and Monterey Park Hospital. She is also part of the USC Latino Alumni Association Executive Advisory Board, the Latina Lawyers Bar Association Advisory Board and the Children’s Hospital Los Angeles Foundation, and she has served on the inaugural gala committee for The Wellness Center at the LAC+USC Hospital Foundation. In honor of Loyola Law School’s centennial, she and her husband established a $100,000 endowed scholarship for Latina students who are the first in their families to attend law school.

During the pandemic, the couple created ZAGives, a 501(c)(3) charity that supported food-insecure communities and funded lunches for health care workers by buying from local restaurants around Los Angeles County. Zapanta also founded Empowered with Gina, an empowerment platform that includes the Empowered with Gina podcast and women’s retreats and events. Of her role on the Loyola board, she has said, “My voice represents a powerful, often-underrepresented majority in our community and I’m proud that LLS is at the forefront of, not only listening, but acting.”