Alexis Bale

Alexis Bale was 11 when her sister, walking to middle school, told her she was good at arguing and should be a lawyer. It was not meant kindly, but she took it as a compliment. At Gonzaga University a legal program advisor told her no law school would admit a 19-year-old. “Because you said I can’t, that means it’s absolutely gonna happen,” she recalls thinking. During COVID she watched the documentary Murder on a Sunday Morning, felt a sense of justice consume her and set out to be a public defender.

Alexis stays close to the next generation of advocates, coaching about half the teams William & Mary sends to mock trial competitions and attending three in recent months. Watching how student advocates use demonstratives and build creative themes in a closed universe informs how she prepares her own cases. She has also learned that as a young woman she will be underestimated, even mistaken for a paralegal at a convention, and she prefers it. “It’s better to be underestimated than overestimated,” she says.

The first major case Alexis worked on involved a big-box company’s delivery driver who T-boned a car carrying three elderly women. Two died; Alexis’s client shattered her leg and would use a wheelchair for life. The company treated the claim as low value. Alexis and her boss Kevin fought through repeated redactions with three motions to compel and about four hearings in two months, and two days before trial the company made an offer they could not refuse. Calling the client to say it was over made her career choice feel real.

Alexis tells of a motorcyclist in his early 30s catapulted through the air on a dark, poorly marked construction road when an oncoming driver followed the cones onto the wrong side. Her firm resolved the driver’s claim and pursued the construction companies, which offered $4,000 at mediation. In jury selection her boss asked whether anyone remembered the construction; a prospective juror muttered, “That was a mess.” The next morning the defendants agreed to $1.3 million. “The perseverance you put in can really impact the outcome,” she says.

Alexis started college classes at Washington State University at 16 through Washington’s dual-enrollment program, finished a bachelor’s degree in economics magna cum laude at Gonzaga University at 19 and began at William & Mary Law School about two weeks after turning 20, graduating in 2024. She won first place and Best Advocate at the 2024 Academy of Allegheny County Trial Lawyers Mock Trial Competition, the Virginia Trial Lawyers Association Trial Advocacy Award and the Order of the Barristers, and interned at state and federal public defender offices.

Alexis practices at Breit Biniazan in Virginia Beach, Virginia, representing plaintiffs in sexual abuse litigation and personal injury cases. She began working with sexual abuse survivors as an extern and has continued since joining the firm, work she calls critically important and exhausting because of the vicarious trauma of carrying clients’ stories. She credits a close-knit office, and especially her paralegal, as a safe place to process it. The firm’s website is bbtrial.com.