The French Dispatch
Between helping startups and advising Fortune 500s, Senami Houndete Craft teaches at Alliance Française

Published in 2025 San Diego Super Lawyers magazine
By Erik Lundegaard on March 13, 2025
Senami Houndete Craft has a thing for west coasts. Her father was from Benin in West Africa, she grew up in Vendée on the west coast of France, and she now lives and practices in San Diego.
“The far west is always very attractive to me—with the freedom and the pioneer aspect of things,” she says with a soupçon of a French accent. “Because of how I grew up, I’m really attracted to the ocean and wanted to offer that to my family. Being a mom of three little kids, I really want them to love the ocean. The connection to nature that you find by the ocean is pretty exceptional.”
Then there’s the surfing. “It’s exactly why we chose San Diego,” she says. “My husband surfs every day, and he wanted to have the biggest waves, the biggest surfable waves.”
Not that the whole of her childhood was spent at the beach. She was often in libraries. By age 6 Craft was writing poetry, and at age 18 she was studying how literature can affect social change. Four years later, she created a business communications company, in which she would help companies write letters, articles, and plans for growth. “Basically like a ghostwriter,” she says.
That’s what led to the law. She wanted to make more of an impact. So she got degrees from the Sorbonne, Sciences Po and Columbia University—all at the same time.
“It’s an existing program,” she says of her master’s, certificate and J.D. “Those three institutions have a partnership to have students study toward joint degrees accredited by these three institutions. … The first six months were between Sciences Po and the Sorbonne in Paris, and the second semester was at Columbia Law. And then I transferred to the J.D. program. During the J.D. program, the first two years were at Columbia Law, and then the last two years at the Sorbonne.”
She now works with businesses—from startups to Fortune 500 companies—who wish to make a social impact. One client, she says, is a cybersecurity company “trying to make networks more secure and ensure privacy is respected and all data is secure. Another example is a social media company that lets users own their own data.”
As if that, and being the mother of three children, isn’t enough, she also teaches: legal issues to business owners via the Carlsbad Chamber of Commerce; and French at Alliance Française. “I am very interested in preserving the French heritage for local kids,” she says.
Could she also practice law in France? “I haven’t taken the Bar in France yet,” she says. “It’s one of my goals in the next few years.” For a time, she did work in-house at a French tech company, then became a visiting scholar in data privacy at UC Berkeley. She also studied infrastructure and real property law. “I was interested in doing project finance in West Africa,” she says, “in developing projects there.”
She opens up when speaking of Benin and her father. “He has an amazing story. He grew up in the fields in a very poor community in a village in northern Benin. His dad passed away when he was 3, and his mom was a single mom, and when he was young he decided he wanted to be a physician so he could help people in pain. Starting at 6 years old, he had to walk to school for two hours. They had no electricity, so he would study with a candle. … Benin was a French colony at the time, and there was no med school, so he went to France for med school—all on scholarships. He became one of the first surgeons in France using robotic surgery for his work. He received the National Order of Merit.”
Is that how she developed her own interest in social justice—through her father? “I’m not exactly sure where it comes from,” she admits. “I was the kid on the playground that would be like, ‘Oh, no, it’s not nice to do this to these other kids.’ I was always interested in making sure everybody is treated fairly.”
What are the major differences between French and U.S. law?
“Actually, [French law] is not that different from California law. … It’s statutes. Just like in California, there’s the civil code and everything is supposed to be in the civil code, but then sometimes the civil code is silent on things, or it’s ambiguous, so you end up relying on case law as well. It’s actually not that different.”
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