Law Offices of Ayala & Williams
OUR LEGAL TEAM
Alvar Ayala
Partner
Alvar Ayala has spent his legal career advocating for low wage workers through class action litigation and legislative initiatives. He was a staff attorney and Executive Director of the legal clinic now known as Raise the Floor Alliance supporting workers centers in the in northern Illinois. Alvar was a partner at Workers' Law Office P.C. for six years where he represented workers in class actions and individual matters. He went on to serve as the employment law supervisor at Chicago Legal Aid where he oversaw the team providing legal assistance on employment matters to low income residents in cook county, Illinois. In 2019 he became the Chief of the Illinois Attorney General's Workplace Rights Bureau. In this role Alvar supervised the enforcement of employment laws throughout the state of Illinois. Alvar created partnerships across government entities to protect Illinois workers during the pandemic and to fight wage theft and misclassification. As Chief of the Workplace Rights Bureau, Alvar oversaw the recovery of millions of dollars in owed wages for workers and penalties for low-road employers. He advised the Illinois legislature on various legislative effort to improve protections for Illinois workers including, most recently, the 2024 amendments to the Illinois Whistleblower Act, and the 2022 amendments to the Illinois Freedom to Work Act. Alvar is a native of Torreon, Coahuila, Mexico.
Chris Williams
Partner
Chris Williams was one of the founders and the first Director of the Working Hands Legal Clinic (now Raise the Floor Alliance) in Chicago, a non-profit legal clinic that works with a network of community-based worker centers to support workplace justice campaigns and to bring access to legal services for low wage Illinois workers in the area of labor and employment law. While Director, Chris advised the Illinois legislature on a number of pieces of legislation designed to protect the rights of Illinois’ most vulnerable workers, from the Illinois Day and Temporary Labor Services Act to the Illinois Right to Privacy in the Workplace Act, creating protections against abuse of the E-Verify system. In 2011, Chris left WHLC to start his own practice, Workers’ Law Office, PC. In 2018, Chris co-founded Grassroots Law & Organizing for Workers (formerly National Legal Advocacy Network), a national network of worker centers and their legal support addressing workplace abuses in a variety of industries, from temp workers, restaurant workers, warehouse workers and domestic workers. In mid 2023, Chris became the lead employment counsel for the Chicago Workers' Collaborative Working Families Legal Clinic. Chris has been lead counsel or co-counseled in over 450 wage and hour and employment discrimination cases, including 45 class actions. Prior to practicing law, Chris spent over a decade as a union organizer for Chicago area labor unions and was a founding member of a Chicago-based worker center.