In 2017, Bailey Lazzari made herself a deal. She would move to Lander, Wyoming, give it six months, and see how things went. She had just graduated cum laude from the University of Wyoming College of Law, and she could have gone anywhere she would have liked.
She is still in Lander and has not seriously thought about leaving since.
What she built there in the years since that six-month trial run is Lazzari Legal, a criminal defense and civil rights firm that handles cases in municipal, state, federal, and tribal courts across Wyoming. The firm takes on serious criminal charges and cases that have drawn national attention, as well as the everyday criminal defense needs of Fremont County residents.
Bailey sits on the board of the Wyoming Trial Lawyers Association and has spent the last several years teaching other attorneys at conferences across the state. She has presented on everything from juvenile justice to federal civil rights claims to the billing questions that confuse small-firm attorneys. She has been recognized by the National Trial Lawyers as one of the Top 40 Under 40 criminal defense attorneys in the country.
She lives in Red Canyon with her partner, overlooking the Wind River Mountains, and most evenings she can be found reading cookbooks the way other people read novels, cover to cover, looking for something worth experimenting with. On weekends, when the caseload allows, she hikes. When she has walked far enough and wants to pretend she is roughing it, she takes the Shasta trailer out. The two dogs who were supposed to be trained and are not come along regardless.
| What did you want to accomplish with your firm in Lander? “I wanted to build a place that empowers the people in it, my staff and my clients both. Not just to better their own situation, but to feel motivated to make a change for the people around them. When the people who work here feel genuinely supported, that carries straight through to how they treat a client who calls us on the worst day of their life. And when a client feels that, it tends to ripple outward into the community. Bettering yourself and bettering those around you are not separate goals here. They are the same goal, and the firm is built to serve both.” |
What Rural Criminal Defense Actually Requires
Wyoming’s geography shapes its legal profession in ways that attorneys in larger states rarely contend with. Fremont County alone is larger than the state of Connecticut. A client in a remote part of the county facing a felony charge does not have a directory full of experienced criminal defense attorneys to call. The options are limited, and the consequences of getting inadequate representation are not abstract.
Lazzari Legal’s practice covers the full range of criminal charges across court systems that operate under significantly different rules and cultures. State court, federal court, municipal court, and the Wind River Tribal Court, where Bailey served as a public defender from 2020 to 2024 and later as a part-time appellate judge, each require a different kind of fluency. Maintaining that fluency while handling every case personally is a specific kind of professional discipline.
| What does a week actually look like for Bailey Lazzari? “A work week for me often means a lot of windshield time. I might have a citation matter in one county on Monday and a felony setting two or three hours away by Thursday. People outside Wyoming hear that and assume it is a grind, but it is one of my favorite parts of the work. I get to drive the state, and I get to practice in some of the most beautiful old courthouses you will ever see. Every county has its own building, its own history, its own way of doing things, and you learn all of it. What surprised me at first, and continues to do so, and what I do not think you find everywhere, is the people who staff these courthouses. The clerks, the bailiffs, and the folks at the front counter are some of the kindest you will ever meet. In a lot of places, a courthouse is a cold building full of strangers, and you are just a number moving through it. Here you walk in, and someone knows your name and asks how your drive was. That is genuinely special, and it is not something every state has. It changes the whole texture of the work. “ |
The firm’s AVVO profile describes Lazzari Legal as a practice that “keeps small town values while reaching across the nation through their legal advocacy.” This framing matters. Bailey has collaborated with law firms nationwide on complex litigation and has handled cases that drew attention well beyond Wyoming.
| Can you tell us what rural practice requires, now that you have been practicing for so long? “Early on, I realized that knowing the law was only half of it. The other half is knowing the rooms and the people in them. Each courthouse has its own rhythm, and the relationships you build with the staff and the local bench matter as much as any brief you file. You cannot phone that in from a distance. You have to show up, drive the miles, and become part of the fabric of each of these communities. Once that clicked, the travel stopped feeling like a cost and started feeling like the point.” |
A Firm Built Around People’s Needs
Lazzari Legal was built with that reality in mind. The firm’s stated focus is on keeping top-notch legal representation available to those who need it while taking on cases large enough to create change in the community.
That second part, the civil rights work and the cases with impact beyond the individual client, reflects something deliberate in how Bailey has structured her practice. The work is local in location, but considerably broader in scope.
| Can you describe a case where the outcome had an effect beyond that one person? “Some of the most meaningful moments in my career have come after suppression hearings. More than once, an officer has come up to me afterward and thanked me. They will say they did not realize what they did was wrong, and that they learned something from it. That stays with me. That is the part people on the outside do not always see. This work does not have to be adversarial in a mean-spirited way. When I challenge how a stop was conducted or how evidence was gathered, I am not trying to embarrass anyone. I am trying to hold the system to the standard it is supposed to meet. And when an officer walks away having learned something, the next stop they make is done a little better. That protects everyone, not just my client. That is how you actually change a community, one corrected practice at a time. How do you decide which cases to take that are in the “change the community” category versus the everyday criminal defense work? I do not really sort cases that way. Every case gets treated like it matters, because to the person living it, it does. The community impact is not a separate category I go chasing. It is what happens when you do the everyday work well. The suppression hearing that teaches an officer something was just one client’s case that I handled the way I handle all of them. And in a community this size, that is the only approach that makes sense. I am going to see that prosecutor next week and stand in front of that same judge next month. You can advocate fiercely for your client and still be someone people are glad to see walk through the door. That is not a compromise. It is how the work should be done.” |
Teaching a Future Generation of Attorneys Across the State
Between 2023 and 2026, Bailey has presented at the Wyoming State Bar Association Annual Meeting, the Wyoming Trial Lawyers Association Annual Conference, the Solo, Small and Rural Law Forum, and several targeted continuing education sessions. The topics span a wider range than most attorneys cover in conference presentations: the jurisdictional implications of a Supreme Court ruling on tribal sovereignty, what attorneys can legally bill across practice areas, how to approach a new criminal case and client from scratch, what civil rights claims under Section 1983 actually require in practice, and what it means to communicate clearly with a client who is in crisis.
That last topic became a 2026 article in the Wyoming Lawyer, titled “Escaping the Expert’s Curse: Communicating Clearly with Clients in Modern Practice.”
Bailey’s undergraduate background is in psychology, a fact that comes through in how she thinks about the attorney–client relationship. Her firm describes itself as person-centered, a term with specific meaning in psychological practice, and the conference work and publications reflect a sustained interest in what good legal communication actually requires, not just competent legal work but genuine comprehension on the part of the person whose case it is.
| What keeps pulling you back to the conference circuit when you already have a full practice? “I became a lawyer mainly to help effectuate change in my community. But I am one person with one small firm, and there is a ceiling on what I can do alone. When I teach other attorneys to be better at this work, my impact is not capped at my own caseload anymore. It grows through every lawyer in that room and every client they go on to serve. The good I am trying to put into the world has a much longer reach that way. That is what keeps pulling me back. What I love about conferences is that they get us out of our offices. So much of this job becomes a paperwork shuffle, and you can lose sight of the fact that there is far more to the profession than that. A conference is a rare chance to step back and remember why the work matters and that there are real people on the other side of every file. The more we keep that in view, the better we are when we walk back into the courtroom. Attorneys leave those rooms reconnected to something, and that is worth as much as any technical skill we cover.” What is the thing you keep seeing Wyoming criminal defense attorneys get wrong, and how do you try to address it when you have a room of them in front of you? “We are too cynical. It is an occupational hazard, and I understand how attorneys get there, but it costs us, and it costs our clients. We forget the prosecutor across the aisle is a person doing a hard job who might be having a bad day. We forget the client who is short with us is frightened and living through the worst stretch of his life, and needs more patience from us, not less. When I have a room of attorneys in front of me, that is what I am really asking them to sit with. Not as a nicety, but because I am convinced it makes you a sharper advocate. The lawyer who can actually see everyone in the room reads it better and gets better results. That is not softness. It is a skill.” |
The WTLA and the Work That Happens in the Legislature
The Wyoming Trial Lawyers Association is the state’s largest voluntary legal organization, with more than 400 members. It describes itself, accurately, as often the only voice defending Wyoming’s justice system in the legislature. Its legislative committee, staffed by both volunteers and paid lobbyists, monitors every bill introduced during the session and tracks committee activity during the interim. Its political action committee, LAWPAC, participates in state elections. The WTLA is not a passive professional membership organization. It is an active participant in shaping the legal conditions under which Wyoming defendants are tried and Wyoming attorneys practice.
Bailey sits on the WTLA board and co-leads its Criminal Law Section. She contributes to the Coffee House, the organization’s bi-annual publication, which covers court decisions, legislative updates, and significant verdicts and settlements for the practicing bar. Her involvement places her inside the organization’s decisions about where to deploy resources, which legislative fights are worth taking on, and how to frame advocacy for defendants’ rights in a state legislature that does not always prioritize them.
For clients in Wyoming, that work is connected to the work done in individual courtrooms in a way that is not always obvious from the outside. The rules that govern how evidence is obtained, how bail is set, and what access defendants have to the materials that will be used against them all run through the legislative process that the WTLA monitors and shapes. A criminal defense attorney who is only present in courtrooms and not in those other rooms is working with one hand.
| What does the WTLA’s work in the legislature mean practically for the people you represent in Lander and Fremont County? “Most people picture the justice system as just what happens inside the courtroom, but the rules of that room get written somewhere else. What evidence can be used, how bail works, what a defendant is entitled to see, all of that runs through the legislature. There is often only a small set of organized voices in Cheyenne speaking up for the defense side of that equation. For a client in Fremont County, that work is invisible, but it is everywhere. It shapes the floor they are standing on before they ever walk into court, and most of them will never know it happened on their behalf.” Is there a specific legislative moment in recent years where the WTLA’s involvement made a concrete difference for criminal defendants in Wyoming? “The issue I care most about right now is protecting how we choose our judges. Wyoming does something a lot of states do not. We do not elect judges in partisan campaigns. A nonpartisan nominating commission vets candidates on their qualifications, and the governor appoints from that list. It sounds technical, but it is one of the most important protections we have. It is designed to keep judges accountable to the law and the Constitution rather than to a political party or a donor base or whatever is popular this election cycle.That system is worth protecting, and there are always pressures to chip away at it. To me, it is close to sacred. The day a judge in Wyoming has to think about the political cost of a correct but unpopular ruling is the day every defendant in this state loses the thing meant to protect them most. Keeping merit selection intact is one of the most important things being done, even though almost no client will ever see it.” What does it mean to be on the board of the organization that is often the only voice for these clients at the policy level? “It is a responsibility I do not take lightly. As lawyers, we are officers of the court, and that means our obligation runs past any one client to the integrity of the system.” |
Making Small-Town Wyoming Better for Criminal Defendants
The phrase “small-town values” gets used often enough to have lost most of its meaning. In a legal context, it can mean almost anything. In Bailey’s case, the Red Canyon address, the national media coverage, and the tribal court appellate work all coexist without contradiction, because the small-town values in question are not about limiting ambition, but about who you are accountable to and what you care about when the cameras are off.
The Wyoming Bar Association has recognized the depth of Bailey’s engagement formally: she has served as President of the Criminal Justice Section, Past Chair Elect of the Criminal Law Section, and Past President of the Federal Indian and Tribal Law Section. Those titles represent real time spent and real decisions made about how the state’s legal profession understands and addresses criminal justice.
| When you describe Lazzari Legal as a firm with small-town values, what does that mean to you in concrete terms? “Small-town values to me mean accountability. Everyone here knows everyone, so the quality of your work and the way you treat people follow you. That is not a burden. It is the reason I do this well. I want to give the person across the courtroom and the person sitting next to me at the grocery store the same standard of care.” Looking at everything together, the cases, the WTLA board, the conferences, the firm, what is the through line? What are you actually building? I am building a firm with a lasting impact. I want the criminal justice system in this state to be a little more fair, the policing to be a little less abrasive, and the political system to make a little more sense, because of changes I had a hand in. It does not happen all at once. It happens little by little. I think of it as dropping bread crumbs. The point is not what I can win in any single case. It is that the trail I am leaving adds up to something that still matters after I have stopped practicing. That is the whole thing, really. Every piece of this, the cases, the teaching, the bar work, is me dropping another crumb. |
For anyone charged with a crime in Wyoming, particularly outside the state’s larger cities, the question of representation is a serious one. The attorneys available, the distance to court, the familiarity a lawyer has with the local court culture, and the judges who sit in it affect outcomes. Bailey has been building that familiarity and that record in Fremont County since 2017.
The Wind River Mountains are visible from her house. The dogs are still untrained. The caseload keeps growing. Bailey Lazzari is adamant about spending her time raising the standard of criminal defense practice across Wyoming and proving that the American justice system is built by the people, for the people.
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