Raquel Cooper

Before joining Manly, Stewart & Finaldi, Raquel served as an Orange County Deputy District Attorney for more than a decade. There, she represented the People of the State of California in the prosecution of hundreds of criminal cases ranging from sexual assault, forcible rape, child molestation, kidnapping, stalking, domestic violence, and attempted murder, among others. She conducted nearly 50 criminal jury trials during her career in the Orange County District Attorney’s Office. Due to her overwhelming trial success, she was promoted to the role of Senior Trial Advisor. In this position, she was one of two selected attorneys tasked with supervising and assisting Deputy District Attorneys with elevating their trial skills, strategies and techniques.

For more than half of her prosecutorial career, Raquel worked in the District Attorney’s Sexual Assault Unit where she exclusively prosecuted felony sexual assault crimes. Many of the survivors in her cases were young children, adults who had been abused as children, and vulnerable elder adults. In the six and a half years spent in the Sexual Assault Unit, Raquel worked with law enforcement at the local and federal level, as well as agencies across the country and internationally to investigate sexual assault crimes, locate, apprehend and often extradite perpetrators to Orange County, where she then filed criminal charges, litigated pre-trial motions, met with survivors, supervised child abuse forensic interviews and conducted jury trials and sentencing hearings.

Raquel conducted numerous sexual assault investigative trainings for the Orange County Sheriff’s Department and other local law enforcement agencies, as well as, conducted numerous trainings for the District Attorney’s office at large relating to the overall prosecution of sexual assault related offenses.