Born and raised in the Bay Area, Diana Maier grew up in Marin County. Her life in public service began as a teenager, where she used her acquired fluency in Spanish to serve as a volunteer tutor for English language learners in San Rafael’s Canal district. At an early age, Diana found her calling in public service. Upon graduating from a local high school in 1988, Diana won an award given to the member of the class most demonstrating the spirit of service and kindness, both in terms of volunteering in the community, and in being inclusive and helpful with her fellow classmates. Diana has spent her life attempting to follow the example of her father, Peter Maier, an incredibly loving, generous, and savvy businessman who used his personal success to give to the people and causes he cared about.
Diana’s story is one that could have never begun. Her father barely escaped Nazi Germany at the age of 10. After a harrowing journey escaping with his young sister and cousin, while being separated from his parents for an entire year, Peter eventually made it to the United States and grew up in Chicago in a one-room apartment, where his family struggled to learn the language and make ends meet by having both parents and kids take on numerous jobs to support the family.
When Peter became a father, he raised his own family to believe in the promise of America and the importance of giving back to his community. He believed that with hard work, anything was possible, and instilled in his children the need to take advantage of every opportunity available to them, particularly around education.
Accordingly, Diana always worked hard to take advantage of her educational opportunities. She attended Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service, graduating in 1992, magna cum laude. After college, Diana worked for a policy organization and then took a job as the foreign policy legislative aid to Congressman Henry Waxman (D-CA), one of the most well-respected and pro-environment Congressmen ever to take office.
While working for Waxman, Diana assisted with the Middle East Regional Cooperation (MERC) program, which brought Middle Eastern scientists together on key issues affecting the environment in North Africa and the Middle East. Many of these projects were related to water, such as increasing efficiency of irrigation and using reclaimed water for a variety of purposes. MERC helped address droughts and extreme weather conditions. This kind of experience gave Diana the policy background that will be especially helpful as MMWD shores up its path to water resilience and reliability.
Eventually, Diana found a passion for the law, and she earned a JD from Stanford Law School In 1998.
After a career as a public defender in the Santa Clara County Public Defender’s office, a job that Diana felt was her true calling but was a difficult one to do with any semblance of balance, Diana went to work for a small but mighty plaintiffs’ employment law firm in 2003. Eventually Diana decided that she did not want to create more litigation in an already overburdened court system, and began considering how to practice preventative employment law. Thus, the Maier Law Group was established in 2008.
It began as a solo show, and has grown to have six attorneys and two paralegal/admins. Since 2022 Diana has been voted by her peers as a “Super Lawyer,” a designation reserved for the the top 5% of lawyers in Northern California. In September 2021, the California Legal Association named Diana its “Attorney of the Month” for her work creating “Joy in the Law,” a lawyers’ conference that serves as a forum for legal professionals to gather and talk about finding joy in their profession, reestablishing the good name (and lives) of attorneys, and bringing their deeply-held values and beliefs to bear in their legal practices.
As a business owner and entrepreneur, as well as the primary bread earner for her family, Diana knows how to take limited resources and manifest change. She also knows how to accomplish things on time and on budget. As a professional mediator, listening to people with diverse perspectives and backgrounds is what she does best. She literally solves conflicts for a living. Diana mediates cases for the U.S. District Court of California and numerous other court panels, as well as privately. She also goes into workplaces around California and mediates interpersonal disputes between employees whose conflicts are keeping them stuck.
Diana has always been very active in her community. Most recently, Diana has served as a very engaged volunteer with the Marin Chapter of Moms Demand Action, a non-partisan gun safety organization. Diana also spent many years serving on the Board of OneJustice, a non-profit legal organization focused on ending inequities in the justice system, with a particular focus on serving non-white, marginalized communities in California.
Diana is also a very active volunteer with her synagogue, Rodef Sholom, a congregation she admires for its spirit of inclusivity and service. Diana’s son, Jesse, was bar mitzvah’d there, and her daughter, June, will be in May 2025.
Diana’s family also strives to do service wherever it can. Most recently, in April 2024, the entire family joined with three other local families to raise the money to build the first ever school in a very remote village of Nicaragua, La Lana. The family then lived with that community while it worked with the villagers to begin constructing the school's foundation. There, she was able to see her kids appreciate, for the first time, that running water and power were not foregone conclusions and that many communities live without those things.
Over the years, Diana has met many local Marin leaders who selflessly give back to their community by holding public office. When she was asked to consider running for Water Board, Diana’s long-standing interest in politics, policy, and public service was reignited. She decided to go for it when her employees told her how her face “lit up” every time she spoke about the issues the Board was addressing.
Diana and her husband, Ethan Kaplan, have been married for 18 years, and are raising two children in Marin County. If elected, she would be the only woman on an all-male board.