A member of the board of advisors of Zoolingua, Gali Hagel is a corporate and nonprofit strategist; advocate for the welfare, rights, and conservation of animals; and former attorney. She sits on the board of Pets in Need, the Bay Area's oldest no-kill shelter. A fervent believer in the power of documentaries to change the world, she is also a member of the SNS FiReFilms steering committee.

A graduate of Duke University, Gali attended the Vanderbilt University School of Law, with adjunct studies at Georgetown. At Vanderbilt, she served as the first female editor-in-chief of the Vanderbilt Journal of Transnational Law.

Gali served as in-house counsel with BellSouth Corp. from 1983 until 1998, primarily as international mergers and acquisitions counsel. After two life-changing trips to Kenya, she left BellSouth to establish her own corporate and entertainment law practice with a pro bono focus on animal law. As an early animal-rights attorney, she joined the initial strategic team of the Great Ape World Heritage Species Project; co-wrote and helped pass Georgia's first felony animal cruelty law; represented pioneering, world-class researchers in the field of interspecies communication; and served as an advisor to sanctuaries and other animal-related entities. Somewhere along the line, she also earned a certificate in Applied Zoo Biology from the Association of Zoos and Aquariums. From 2002 to 2009, she served as general counsel of the Hoover Group, a multinational manufacturing company.

Gali is the author of "A Practitioner's Introduction to Saudi Arabian Law" (Vanderbilt Journal of Transnational Law) and other legal articles; co-author of "The Great Ape World Heritage Species Project" (Conservation in the 21st Century: Gorillas as a Case Study); and author of "The Myelin Repair Foundation Accelerated Research Collaboration Model: Innovative Disruption in Biomedical Research" (Collaborative Innovation in Drug Discovery: Strategies for Public and Partnerships). She is currently working on a law-review article on the legal recognition of nonhuman animal sentience, as well as on a memoir.