Melissa Meira Amster has dedicated her law career to special education and disability law. She seeks to help parents attain maximum potential through advocacy.

Her passion in this area of law comes from personal experience. In October 2011, her daughter was born with Down syndrome and a heart defect which required open heart surgery. At first, she found the process of attending to her daughter’s medical and physical needs overwhelming, but soon found online support groups. These support gave her valuable information and encouragement to advocate for her daughter.

Over the years her advocacy skills increased, as well as her passion for helping others. Ms. Amster found a wide discrepancy in services that children might receive correlated to how good of an advocate or how knowledgeable about services their parent was. The better the advocate, more services the child might receive. Ms. Amster strongly believes that all people with disabilities, not just ones that have better advocates, should receive all needed available services.

With this passion in-hand, she began volunteering with the Office of Clients’ Rights Advocacy, Disability Rights California. She was later a temporary Clients’ Rights Advocate. There she focused on evaluating regional center eligibility, securing appropriate placements, and analyzing and giving legal advice regarding notices of action from the regional center.