Biography
Wesley Bizzell serves as ALCS’s Senior Assistant General Counsel, Governmental and External Affairs, and Managing Director of Political Law & Ethics Programs. Previously, Wesley was an attorney at Winston & Strawn and worked on Capitol Hill for more than six years, serving as an aide to Arkansas Senators David Pryor and Dale Bumpers.
Wesley is an authority on political compliance law and is active in the compliance legal community. He is a longtime faculty member for the Practicing Law Institute’s annual Corporate Political Activities conference. For four years, he served as co-chair of the Conference Committee for the Council on Governmental Ethics Laws (“COGEL”), a professional organization of officials with responsibilities in governmental ethics, elections, campaign finance, and lobby laws, and he served from 2020-2023 on COGEL’s board of directors. In 2018, COGEL awarded Wesley its highest honor, the COGEL Award, for making a “demonstrable and positive contribution to the fields of campaign finance, ethics, elections, lobbying and freedom of information over a significant period of time.”
Wesley is extremely active in promoting diversity and inclusion within the legal and corporate communities and is a frequent speaker on the topic. In addition to serving as Mosaic’s chair, he is one of its co-founders and is the past president of the National LGBTQ+ Bar Association, after serving a two-year term as president. He serves on the American Bar Association’s (ABA) Commission on Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity, having been appointed by three successive ABA Presidents. Yearly since 2017, he has been named by London’s Financial Times or Yahoo Finance as one of the 100 worldwide OUTstanding Leading LGBTQ+ Corporate Executives, and Chambers and Partners also named him the 2019 LGBTQ+ Equality Lawyer of the Year for his efforts to advance LGBTQ+ professionals in the law. He is a board member for the tech nonprofit InReach, the world’s first tech platform matching LGBTQ+ people, including those seeking asylum, facing discrimination and persecution with safe, verified resources. He also serves on the Matthew Shepard Foundation’s Advisory Council and the Thomson Reuters Institute’s Diversity, Equity & Inclusion Advisory Board.
Wesley graduated with a B.A. in Justice, magna cum laude, from the American University in Washington, D.C. and received a Master of Social Work with a focus in public policy from the Catholic University of America. He received his J.D., magna cum laude, from Georgetown University Law Center, where he was elected to the Order of the Coif and served as an editor for the Georgetown Law Journal.