Founding attorney
Lea Nehme
Lea Nehme is an immigration attorney and an immigrant herself. She has devoted her legal career to immigration matters and understands that a case is experienced through documents, deadlines, changing facts, and long periods in which each decision may affect the next one.
Review required before publication
Professional focus
Lea's experience includes O-1 and EB-1 matters involving individual records, as well as employment, investor, family, asylum, and other humanitarian cases. Cedar's principal focus combines high-achievement evidentiary work, long employment-based timelines, and category strategy.
Her approach begins with honest, fact-based analysis. In an evidentiary case, that means separating accomplishment from proof, deciding what each piece of evidence can establish, and building a coherent argument from the record as a whole.
Review required before publication
Lea must approve every biographical sentence, credential, and admission before production publication.
Immigrant perspective
Lea's own experience as an immigrant, together with her family's experience navigating the immigration process, informs the attention she gives to the practical consequences of status, delay, and uncertainty. Those experiences helped shape her decision to build a practice where client care includes close attention to how each legal choice affects the person living through it.
Education
- Juris Doctor, University of California, Berkeley School of Law
- Bachelor of Arts, University of California, Berkeley
Admissions
- State Bar of California
- United States District Court for the Central District of California
Humanitarian experience
During law school at the University of California, Berkeley, Lea worked through immigration clinics on pro bono asylum and direct-service matters and with organizations including the ACLU and Tahirih Justice Center, which assists women and children escaping gender-based violence. This experience is part of her professional formation and does not imply that Cedar currently accepts every humanitarian matter.