Paulina (Lina) Houston, Esq. has spent the last several years investigating employee concerns as part of internal investigations teams, first at Tesla and then at CrowdStrike. She has conducted hundreds of internal investigations into allegations of harassment, sexual harassment, discrimination, retaliation, bullying, conflicts of interest, favoritism, and workplace violence. Lina has experience investigating all types of concerns, including those in which a single allegation is raised against a single person; “word against word” situations without witnesses or supporting evidence; and complex cases involving multiple complainants, allegations, and subjects. She has confidently investigated concerns raised by, against, and involving employees at all levels, from contractors and individual contributors to Executive level and above.

Lina believes in a human-centered approach to investigations; she puts people first, enters each conversation and interaction with respect, and remains mindful of the impact workplace concerns and investigations have on the lives of those involved. She employs an intersectional lens in her investigations, and has a critical understanding of how an individual's intersecting identities shape their experiences, how they perceive and interact with others, and how others perceive and interact with them.

Before focusing her career on investigations, Lina worked in various roles and sectors that allowed her to hone her ability to hold complexity, analyze legal issues, and create space for people to openly share difficult information about their lives and circumstances. Prior to working at Tesla, Lina was an Associate Attorney at the Law Office of Emily Doskow, a family law practice focused on LGBTQ family formation and mediated dissolution; a Program Director at If/When/How: Lawyering for Reproductive Justice, where she trained and mentored hundreds of law students from across the country to be thoughtful and strategic organizers for reproductive justice; and a Death Penalty Clerk and Graduate Law Clerk at the Contra Costa County Office of the Public Defender.

During law school, Lina clerked at the Marin County Public Defender and at the Neighborhood Justice Center, a nonprofit community defense office in St. Paul, Minnesota. She also clerked at the Minnesota Department of Human Services, where she helped develop a statewide system to ensure that pregnant and parenting people had access to mental health and chemical dependency treatment programs.

Lina received her law degree from the University of Minnesota Law School. She graduated magna cum laude from the University of California Los Angeles with a B.A. in African American Studies. Her honors undergraduate thesis was titled “It’s Like a Jungle Sometimes: Musical Representations of the Black Underclass from the 1960s through the 1990s.”