Pro bono/Community Service:

• I served annually as needed as a small claims court judge pro tem from 1998 throgh 2010.

Verdicts and Settlements:

• $476,500 Recovery for Local Company Cheated Out of Sales Commissions An East Coast company hired a Los Angeles-based company to act as its sales force and target Fortune 500 companies. The contract entitled our client to receive commissions on all deals in which it had any involvement. [This favorable term was negotiated after the East Company refused to give any equity in it.] After the Los Angeles company started generating leads, the East Coast company began repudiating agreements about which target accounts could be pursued. It also cancelled the contract, interfered with its agent's ability to close deals, and concealed the closing of several deals its agent had worked on. After the Los Angeles company failed to resolve the dispute informally, it retained Los Angeles trial lawyer Jeffrey Cowan and The Cowan Law Firm. Jeffrey invoked the arbitration clause in the parties’ contract. The East Coast company responded by proposing that the companies mediate in the interests of minimizing legal fees. We were amenable – until the East Coast company refused to provide any information about what deals had closed and the revenues they had generated (a requirement to avoid negotiating “in the dark”). We renewed our demand to arbitrate. The East Coast company ignored us. Because the contract specified that the winning party in any lawsuit could not recover its legal fees if it violated its contractual duty to arbitrate, we filed a “petition to arbitrate” lawsuit in the Los Angeles Superior Court. The East Coast company opposed the lawsuit. A judge rejected its arguments and ordered arbitration. The East Coast company then voluntarily paid our client’s legal fees incurred to that point without the need for more motion practice. The East Coast company then again proposed mediation. This time, however, it agreed to provide financial information. We mediated twice with retired Superior Court Judge Eric Younger over an 8 month period – with the second session involving hundreds of pages of documents and independent witnesses. As a result, the East Coast company agreed to pay $476,500 to settle our client’s claims.
• $468,000 for Victim of Retaliation:A Los Angeles company hired our client to work as an in-house recruiter. After one week of employment, he received an email stating that the company was rejecting a female job candidate he had submitted because the vice president wanted to hire a man. Our client sent an email objecting to the instruction, citing the federal law that prohibits gender discrimination in the workplace and asking what the job's requirements were. He also confronted the vice president in person. The company fired our client a week later. Although the company told our client he was being laid off for "economic reasons" and was eligible for re-hire, the company told others that he had been fired for performance reasons. Our client was unable to find comparable work and also suffered depression (a condition that runs in his family).We sued the company for unlawful retaliation under California's employment civil rights statute, the Fair Employment and Housing Act ("FEHA"). During discovery, the company could not get its story straight about why it fired our client or who made the decision to do so. It also was caught (a) trying to hide a key witness and (b) trying to tamper with her testimony before she could be subpoenaed for a deposition. We filed a special motion for discovery sanctions and an instruction to the jury about the company's misconduct and the inferences that could be drawn from it. The judge hinted that he was going to grant the motion and then deferred ruling on it. The lawsuit then settled just two weeks before trial for $468,000., 2008
• $435,000 for sexual harassment victim.  A Fortune 100 corporation doing business in Southern California had a policy prohibiting sexual harassment that existed only on paper. As a result, for years our client was subjected to crude sexual comments by not only her fellow employees (male and female) but also her managers. When our client reported this conduct - which she found highly offensive - to her supervisors and the company’s anonymous hotline, nothing happened. Once, our client was told by a manager whose fiance also was being sexually harassed that store politics kept him from doing anything. Our client also watched a colleague who complained about sexual harassment receive ridicule, scorn and retaliation from the manager in charge of her store. When our client finally reported her sexual harassment to managers willing to act, the company not only failed to follow its own procedures but also failed to take the kind of remedial action that either California or federal law requires. Shockingly, the company’s district manager supervising the investigation knew little about how to investigate sexual harassment. This supervisor also rebuffed our client’s efforts to report all of the harassment that had been occurring because this manager assumed (incorrectly) that she had been told about all incidents of sexual harassment. All of these actions caused our client to become depressed - to the point where she could not work or always care for her three children. Our client also started suffering panic attacks and became suicidal despite being on prescribed anti-depressants and seeing a psychologist. A forensic psychologist we hired confirmed after extensive testing that our client was “legitimately” depressed and not exaggerating or faking her symptoms. We sued the company for sexual harassment (California Government Code § 12940(j)) and for failing to prevent sexual harassment (California Government Code § 12940(k)) after it rejected our offer to talk settlement without a lawsuit. After the company got the lawsuit transferred from court to an arbitrator (our client had signed an arbitration agreement), we started deposing key witnesses. Not surprisingly, the managers who had either turned a blind eye or perpetrated sexual harassment lied at their depositions about their actions. As a result, Jeffrey Cowan canvassed Southern California to find witnesses whom we believed would impeach the lying managers. Sure enough, both former and current disinterested employees gave testimony that contradicted the managers (and corroborated our client’s story). Two months before trial, the company asked to mediate the lawsuit. After a mediation in San Francisco, the lawsuit settled in June 2009 for $435,000 and a promise from the corporation that its non-managerial employees in the store where our client had worked would be educated about sexual harassment at least once a week for a year., 2009

Representative Clients:

• Academy of Magical Arts, Inc., Paris Hilton Entertainment, Guardian Pool Fence Systems

Educational Background:

• BA (cum laude) from Cornell University;  J.D. from the UCLA School of Law