Official biography from the CA Court of Appeal website:
Justice Ioana Petrou was appointed by Governor Edmund G. Brown to the First Appellate District in 2018. Prior to her appointment, Justice Petrou served as a judge on the Alameda County Superior Court.
Justice Petrou graduated with highest distinction in general scholarship from the University of California, Berkeley in 1988 and went on to receive her law degree from Berkeley Law in 1993. During law school, she externed for the Honorable Sheila Prell Sonenshine at the Fourth District Court of Appeal.
After law school, Justice Petrou worked at Foley & Lardner LLP's San Francisco's office, where she was a civil litigator and engaged in extensive pro bono work, earning the firm's Lynford Lardner Community Service Award. Justice Petrou left Foley & Lardner to serve as an Assistant U.S. Attorney in the criminal division of the U.S. Attorney’s Office, Eastern District of New York. Justice Petrou returned to the Bay Area in 2002 and was of counsel at O’Melveny and Myers before serving as an Assistant U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of California from 2004 to 2010, where she was the Criminal Health Care Fraud Coordinator and Chief of Major Crimes.
In 2010, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger appointed Justice Petrou to serve as a judge of the Alameda County Superior Court. Justice Petrou worked in family, criminal, unlimited civil, and complex civil assignments. She also supervised the civil division, chaired her court’s judicial education and civil committees, and was a member of the executive committee.
Justice Petrou was honored by the Alameda Contra Costa Trial Lawyers as the Alameda County 2016 Trial Judge of the Year and was named by The Recorder legal paper as a 2009 California Attorney of the Year.
Justice Petrou is a member of the Judicial Council of California’s Advisory Committee on Civil Jury Instructions and the State-Federal Judicial Council Committee. Justice Petrou served on the board of the of the California Judges Association from 2014 to 2017 as the representative for Alameda and Contra Costa Counties and has served on various CJA committees. Currently, she is the chair of the CJA Appellate Committee. Prior to her appointment to the Alameda County Superior Court, Justice Petrou was pro bono general counsel for Breast Cancer Prevention Partners and served on its executive board. Justice Petrou currently serves on the board of the Association of Business Trial Lawyers.
Over the course of her career, Justice Petrou has taught a wide variety of courses including trial practice, litigation, family law, health care, and white collar matters to legal, industry, and government groups. Since 2014, she has been teaching trial practice at Berkeley Law.
