Fighting for Her Values

It was day 16 of the 2026 Uber sexual assault civil trial, and Sarah London was listening to the defense’s closing argument. While mentally preparing the last words the jurors would hear from her, she felt both moved and determined to not let down Jaylynn Dean—the woman who came forward after she was raped by her Uber driver at 19—nor the team of female trial lawyers London had assembled from across the country as liaison counsel for more than 3,000 similar sexual assault cases.

“There are huge barriers for people coming forward, because our culture is so deeply entrenched with rape myths and victim blaming. For the courts, through the Uber litigation, to form multidistrict litigation where there was real power in numbers to put pressure on the company to produce evidence—and people could join and not feel like they are alone—it was a real game changer,” says London, who, before becoming a lawyer, was a community organizer for Planned Parenthood. “Those are my values—about collective action, about being able to join together. And I was so proud of these women.”

Sitting beside London in federal court in Phoenix that February day, taking in a scene in which the heads of litigation at both counsel tables were women, was trial counsel Deborah Chang. “There was something very special and magical about the case. I was near tears every day, just out of the sheer significance and importance of living in that moment,” says Chang, a Los Angeles catastrophic injury attorney. “All of us who are involved owe a huge debt of gratitude to Sarah, because she found us, she brought us together, she led us, and she believed in us. The fact that [our side was] all women is something that I think no one will forget.”

Chang notes that the stakes were high given that the preceding state court verdict was for the defense, making Uber look unbeatable. “There was so much pressure on us to win,” she says. “There were lawyers who had flown over to watch from Florida, from Texas, from California—from everywhere.”

They all listened as, in her closing argument, London used the defense attorney’s words against her: that this case was about “this ride, this trip, this driver.” She pointed out that Uber knew the elevated risk rating for the ride, the driver’s history of rule violations, and the safety measures that were not employed. London concluded by taking issue with the lawyer’s suggestion that the plaintiff’s side had tried to “minimize” Dean’s past.

Successfully shielding Dean from Uber’s attempts to make her relive past traumas on the stand is one of London’s most proud moments from the trial. “What you saw here in this courtroom, of parading the worst moments of her life—that were all before she was raped by her Uber driver—that is exactly the kind of thing that stops people from coming forward and reporting,” London told the jury. “This is a public trial. Women everywhere are listening to this. ‘If I come forward, is my whole life going to have to go out and be exposed?’ Uber counted on that. They counted on … women being silent, on the underreporting that fuels their business and makes it seem safer than it is.”

The jury returned with a verdict of $8.5 million in compensatory damages for the plaintiff, finding that the driver was an apparent agent of Uber, and thus the company was responsible for his actions. Though the jury didn’t award any punitive damages, London says it was a significant win for Dean—and the cases to come.

“The jury believed her, and that was the most important thing. It’s a meaningful number that sets a good tone for the rest of the litigation [against Uber]. Every case you try you learn something, you look for ways to improve. And we’ll continue.”

After all, this was not London’s first foray as an MDL liaison counsel against a controversial San Francisco company.

In 2022, she co-led the team that reached a $2 billion settlement with Juul, resolving more than 5,000 cases on behalf of a group of plaintiffs that included consumers, families, school districts and Native American tribes. “She’s our fearless leader. It’s a delight to watch such a strong, powerful, talented woman who doesn’t get pushed around by the guys,” says co-lead Ellen Relkin of Weitz & Luxenberg. “Everyone doesn’t like something, but no one doesn’t like Sarah London.”

Relkin invokes that old Sara Lee jingle to explain how London managed to keep the Juul litigation’s steering committee—with its large cast of characters and egos—unified and on task; people like and respect her that much.

“She is one of those rare attorneys who has it all,” Relkin says. “She has strong oral advocacy arguing complex motions before a judge. She’s persuasive in front of a jury. She’s sincere and brilliant, and she can also write a mean brief. She’s that good. And she’s got three little kids. She pulls it all off.”

London grew up outside of Chicago. From a young age, she felt drawn to the fight—like when her fifth grade teacher barred the girls from playing eraser tag with the boys. “He believed that it wasn’t competitive enough if the girls played, and so I led a walkout to our principal,” she says. 

Her mother was a public school teacher who, along with London’s grandmother, was active in the teachers union. London’s grandfather was in the painters union, while her father was a traveling salesman who ran a bingo hall where she worked during college. “As attractive as the bingo dynasty was, calling bingo numbers was actually not my strong suit,” she laughs.

The family tradition of civic engagement, however, led London into community organizing. After undergrad at Northwestern University, she received civic leadership training with the Coro Fellows Program in Public Affairs. Then she worked as an organizer for a union of home care workers in Missouri before becoming a public policy manager for Planned Parenthood in Kansas. 

“They were awesome roles where I worked with communities to drive change and seek justice,” London says. “A part of me always thought I would stay an organizer.”

With Planned Parenthood, she organized against an effort to restrict access to abortion care using building code restrictions. “This was the trend in the mid-2000s,” she says. “That bill passed the Kansas Legislature, but our organizing efforts successfully led to a veto by then-Governor Sebelius. … We were then able to block the override of her veto, protecting access to health care.”

There was also an attempt by the Kansas State Board of Education to remove teaching evolution from schools. “After they did that, the next thing was sex education. There was a big push to impose abstinence-only, shame-based sex education,” London says. “I built a coalition of clergy, nurses, parents, teachers and teenagers to oppose the mandatory abstinence-only program. We supported a bipartisan bill … [and] our organizing helped push the bill through committees. With a lot of support from the Legislature, we protected the kids in Kansas.”

London pursued law school to better advocate for legislation protecting reproductive health care and comprehensive sex education. “I remember getting that email of acceptance from Berkeley Law under the rotunda in the Kansas Statehouse, and just finding so much gratitude and excitement for the next chapter.”

After deferring for one year to make sure that the policies she’d been working on were adopted, London quickly fell in love with the law. While she knew she wanted to represent “people seeking justice against the bigger, more powerful interests,” she was unsure of the path.

London, the first in her family to go to law school, asked her counselor for help, and he pulled a list of plaintiff’s attorney names out of a drawer. “I think all but one of them was no longer practicing or had died,” London says. “And then there was Elizabeth Cabraser.”

At Lieff Cabraser, where she started as a summer associate in 2008 and stayed for 16 years, London was given early trial experience on cases involving the anti-inflammatory drug Vioxx and the HIV drug Norvir. In the latter, she worked on jury selection and the Batson challenge that would lead to the 9th Circuit decision extending protections to gay and lesbian jurors. 

Around the same time, Lieff Cabraser partnered with Woody Wilner to try 4,000 tobacco cases in Florida stemming from the Engle v. Liggett Group class action that had ended in a $145 billion jury verdict. The Florida Supreme Court had decertified the class, allowing for individual plaintiffs to file their own cases using Engle’s findings. One of London’s early tasks was to read and summarize that two-year trial while writing a declaration of the findings and evidence. “I’ll never forget the day when I was prepared to talk all about my declaration that I had spent the better part of the summer doing, and the judge said, ‘I find that the declaration need not be considered because I’m going to rule on other grounds,’” London says. “But one of the great benefits of having read that entire trial was that I knew the evidence, and it made me very valuable to the trial team. Because the judge set so many cases for trial at one time to move things forward, it meant that we all had to step up, and my senior partners gave me pretty early opportunities to get out there.”

Before long, London was second chair, putting on witnesses, picking juries and delivering openings and closings while traveling around Florida to learn her clients’ stories. “Being able to try very similar cases multiple times allows you to really hone your craft and develop best practices for the most effective ways to present,” she says. “Every case is unique. Every story, every family is different. But I got more and more comfortable with how to tell the story about what the 50-year conspiracy was. We got more effective, and we studied how we can be better at communicating with juries and selecting juries.”

In 2015, by the time the remaining tobacco cases were resolved in a $100 million settlement—and the same day London found out she was pregnant with her first son—she had led 14 cases to trial, winning multiple verdicts.

“I learned how to have my own style,” London says. “I came up under these tremendous trial lawyers, but they were older men and they had a different approach. What I learned over the course of trying so many different cases was how to use my voice, to trust that I could connect with juries by being myself. It was such an incredible opportunity and experience as a young lawyer.”

As she moved on to other cases, London remembers wondering if her specific expertise at telling the story of nicotine, addiction and youth targeting would ever be useful again. Then a parent called the firm, saying their teenage son had suffered a debilitating stroke. That’s how she heard about Juul.

“It was devastating to me that what we were looking at was another round of what I thought I had just put in the past,” she says. “I felt like I was called and compelled to get very involved in working on cases against Juul. Several of the experts that we worked with in the past were really fired up to work on these cases; we could really build on what we had learned.”

Relkin says the Juul cases were the first in a new wave dealing with tech tobacco and, like the Uber cases, a young client base that had been targeted by social media. In addition to the novelty and scope of the litigation, the speed at which it was resolved was stunning: The MDL was formed in 2019, and by the end of 2022, a global resolution was reached for all claims. In the spring of 2023, London, Relkin, Dena Sharp, Dean Kawamoto, and their team reached another $235 million settlement with Altria for Juul-related claims.

Chang, a former president of the Consumer Attorneys of California and the Los Angeles chapter of the American Board of Trial Advocates, says Juul is talked about as one of the smoothest-run mass torts in history. Now, against Uber, she’s getting a firsthand view of London’s skill at organizing, leading and managing large teams of lawyers.

“You are always making decisions that could hurt someone’s feelings. You are always having to make harsh decisions that some people will disagree with,” Chang says. “Sarah’s gift is that she makes every team member feel so essential and important and appreciated. She is magical in her belief in justice and doing the right thing, and she is someone who is so positive—and filled with wonder and awe of what we can do as lawyers—that you can’t help but gravitate to her passion.”

Another of London’s passions is her litigation involving the fertility industry, stemming back to the 2018 cryogenic tank failure at Pacific Fertility Center in San Francisco that destroyed 3,500 eggs and embryos—including those belonging to her friends. That same weekend, a similar tank failure in Cleveland damaged 4,000 more.

“I thought to myself, ‘There’s got to be a case here’; I was not aware of other cases involving product liability and embryos or eggs,” she says. “With the support of my partners, I started representing families. It was really eye-opening to me, the fertility industry being unregulated, and some of the shortcuts and lack of care with handling the most precious, irreplaceable material.”

In 2021, London worked behind the scenes as Sharp won a $15 million jury verdict against the tank manufacturer for three women and a married couple who lost their eggs and an embryo. Another trial lawyer on that case was Nina Gliozzo, who was London’s right-hand paralegal on the tobacco cases.

Four years later, London left Lieff Cabraser to join both of them at Girard Sharp, where she’s currently leading a litigation against CooperSurgical over defective IVF culture media. 

“When I began working on these cases, being a woman of exactly that age, this was not a case that every lawyer was clamoring to work on,” London says. “People that weren’t of our demographic didn’t see the real harm and value. … Just like sexual assault, for people who have undergone fertility trauma, it’s very difficult to speak out. It’s very stigmatized. There are a lot of barriers to coming forward. It’s a real honor and privilege to work with these clients.”

London says the superpower that enables her to keep fighting—to lead and litigate with a 10 year-old and 8-year-old twins at home—is her family. “It takes a huge toll on any family,” she says. “I miss them, and they miss me when I’m gone. It’s hard, but they’re really proud of the work I do. Being a trial lawyer is a sacrifice for everyone.

“Working on these MDL cases, you have the backup of the entire steering committee. In Uber, we had lawyers who dropped everything and flew to Phoenix just to help … no job too small,” she continues. “That’s the teamwork that makes the dream work. It really does.”