Yaya, a partner at Relman Colfax PLLC, has successfully tried numerous civil rights cases to verdict over the past several years. She played a leading role in Gilead Community Services v. Town of Cromwell, a case against a Connecticut municipality that engaged in a discriminatory campaign to close a group home for people with mental health disabilities. In October 2021, a jury found in favor of the plaintiffs and returned a verdict of nearly $5.2 million in compensatory and punitive damages. In Hicks v. Ferreyra, et al., Yaya represented a Black Secret Service agent who was illegally seized by two United States Park Police officers while he was at work and on protective duty. A federal jury awarded Agent Hicks $730,000, including $525,000 in punitive damages, and, in March 2023, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit affirmed the verdict in its entirety.

Yaya is proud of her representation of fair housing organizations across the country. Yaya represented twenty-one fair housing organizations in a systemic housing discrimination case against the Federal National Mortgage Association (Fannie Mae). The suit alleged that in the wake of the foreclosure crisis, Fannie Mae maintained and marketed its foreclosed homes well in predominantly white neighborhoods, selling them to owner-occupants and preserving neighborhoods, while allowing homes in communities of color to fall into disrepair. The case culminated in a landmark $53 million settlement agreement, at least $35 million of which is being disbursed to local communities to promote homeownership, neighborhood stabilization, access to credit, property rehabilitation, and residential development. On behalf of an upstate New York fair housing organization and eight individual plaintiffs who had alleged that a local landlord engaged in a decades-long practice of demanding sexual favors as a condition of tenancy, she secured settlement providing for substantial injunctive relief and $400,000 in damages and attorneys’ fees.

Beyond her litigation practice, Yaya leads civil rights and racial equity audits and provides civil rights counseling advice to institutions and organizations. She is a frequent lecturer on housing and lending discrimination issues for national, state, and local groups, including the National Fair Housing Alliance and the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund.

Yaya is an adjunct professor at the Howard University School of Law. She currently co-chairs the Nominations Committee of the Asian Pacific American Bar Association of the Greater Washington, D.C. Area and serves on its Board of Directors.