Humanity First

Doris Cheng is grappling with the heft of this American moment. She sighs, takes a beat, shoulders rolled forward, and admits that she’s had a “heavy, emotional day.” 

The personal injury and products liability lawyer just finished discussions with two different organizations about how to proceed in the wake of President Donald Trump’s executive orders to eliminate DEI programs and policies. 

“With the administration targeting private entities who support diversity, equity, and inclusion; targeting law firms that have represented interests that the president dislikes; targeting people on streets—anyone who cares about human rights and civil rights has to step in,” says Cheng from her office at Walkup, Melodia, Kelly & Schoenberger.

In late January, Cheng became national vice president of the American Board of Trial Advocates (ABOTA). She’ll ascend to the presidency in 2027, and her national leadership role has her even more fired up than usual about safeguarding Americans’ Seventh Amendment rights—particularly since she’s worried that the entire rule of law is threatened.

“Being in leadership for ABOTA means having another avenue to advocate for the rule of law and to reinforce a civilized society,” she says. “As attorneys, we have taken an oath to support the Constitution. The main job is to speak for people who cannot speak for themselves and to advocate their position based on just laws that are equally enforced and consistent with international human rights. In this moment, the key is that the just laws are equally enforced so that no one is above the law.”

The attacks on judges, both in criminal and civil cases, threaten our society as a whole, she continues. “The executive branch’s attacks on judges weaken the independence of the judicial branch. Without an independent judiciary, there will be no one to hold people accountable for lawlessness. The Sixth Amendment right to an impartial jury in a criminal trial and the Seventh Amendment right to a civil jury trial are intended to ensure that people can participate in the way that their lives are being run. When you start to take away people’s participation, you lose humanity.”

Losing humanity is the notion that sent Cheng toward the law to begin with.

The daughter of Chinese immigrants, Cheng and her three siblings grew up in a diverse San Francisco neighborhood. Cheng’s father left China in 1939, during the Second Sino-Japanese War, eventually making his way to New York and then San Francisco. A matchmaker in China paired up her parents, and although her mother was living in Hong Kong, the couple had grown up on the same island and chose to make San Francisco their home. 

She cleaned homes while he worked in the kitchen at the Iron Pot, a famed but now-closed Italian restaurant that was in the Financial District. It was the kind of place celebrities would drop in: Cheng has a black-and-white photo of her father among the kitchen staff standing next to Willie Mays. “Because both of my parents were in blue-collar service jobs, I think the measure of success for them was to make sure their children have better occupations,” says Cheng.

Her mother’s English skills were not great, so before Cheng even understood what an advocate was, she was fulfilling that role for her mother—for everything from medical care to talking to her employers—and for others in their community, too. “When you’re in an immigrant network, everybody has to take care of each other,” she says. “My mom and dad were the go-to people for their friends and their families.” 

When a neighbor was mugged and died from her injuries, for example, it was Cheng’s father who stepped up to find out where she was taken. “My dad, because he spoke English, called around to the hospitals and found her at San Francisco General,” she says. “The family was able to find her. Those were the sort of advocacy things you don’t realize that you’re taking on; it’s just what you did for each other. It was how you showed your humanity.”

Years later, as a law student with the University of San Francisco School of Law’s Intensive Advocacy Program—a program Cheng now co-directs—she felt unexpectedly at ease standing in a courtroom. “It was like, ‘Wait, I’ve been here before,’” she says. “Standing in that courtroom was the first time I felt comfortable in any law school space. You had to think on your feet, you had to speak up for somebody else. … It felt like home, and it occurred to me why: I had done this for my mother as a child—speaking for her as her patient advocate or calling the utility company on her behalf. Advocacy was just a very natural part of my life experience.”

At the time, Cheng thought she would work in criminal defense. Growing up in the ’70s and ’80s, she felt—and still feels—that the criminal justice system disproportionately prosecutes people of color. “I thought I was going into the law to stamp out systemic racism,” she says. Her father had served as a merchant seaman for the Coast Guard through the 1950s, but he was regularly under threat of arrest or deportation during his service. “The notion that ethnic minorities always seemed more vulnerable in our American society—whether it was not assimilating as easily or not having the same benefits that are part of a free democracy, having to ask for those benefits and fearing that we would receive them as a matter of right … I initially thought the criminal justice space was the only place to serve those interests.”

At the Intensive Advocacy Program, one of her professors asked if she’d ever considered plaintiffs’ work and recommended her for an interview at Walkup Melodia. They offered her a summer position in 1997. She never left.

Enduring professional relationships are what Cheng is about, says Natalie Kaliss, an associate at Latham & Watkins. “Doris has a huge amount of energy to give to, and invest in, others,” says Kaliss, who was 14 and enrolled in a mock trial program at their shared alma mater of Lowell High School when she first met Cheng. “I’m now 29, so I’ve had a relationship with Doris for more than half my life.”

Kaliss remembers the moment the two met. “There was another lawyer giving a speech, but Doris burst into the room and took over in this incredible way,” she says. “I gravitated toward her confidence. She’s a firecracker. It wasn’t just me—all the other students had an equal reverence and admiration for her, because she is very encouraging of other people and their abilities. Doris always told us that each person has a voice and [that] your voice matters. You don’t need to pretend to be anyone else, particularly as a lawyer. I don’t think it’s a surprise that a good amount of the students that worked with Doris all became lawyers.”

Some tough love was doled out when needed, Kaliss adds, but it was always encouraging. “During a year when we were going to the state competition, Rihanna’s ‘Diamonds’ was a hit. [Cheng would] email the team snippets of the song to encourage us, and I always think of her when I hear it. She has this luminescence—particularly in trial. Many attorneys are wonderful litigators, great oral advocates, great writers. But Doris is a trial lawyer. Her special sauce is knowing what matters to people emotionally. She’s very good at understanding what makes someone tick, and she knows how to tell a story.”

Cheng has told many people’s stories over the last two-plus decades. “Do you remember that show 1000 Ways to Die?” she says. “I’ve had a front-row seat to a million ways people can get hurt. It’s with me all the time.”

What Cheng most loves about her work is helping people; her clients find her at some of the lowest points in their lives. She also likes the idea that her work has the potential to impact those she’s never even met. 

Consider a case she took on behalf of a worker in a semiconductor factory. Cheng’s client was tasked with cleaning a molecular beam epitaxy, the machine that makes the semiconductor wafers—used for powering everything from cellphones to microwaves. As tech has evolved, Cheng says, scientists have started using phosphorus in manufacturing the waters. 

But white phosphorus ignites spontaneously in room air—a risk that was never assessed or eliminated in the engineering design. And the company knew that workers had encountered smoke and fires with the cleaning operation of the machine, specifically when phosphorus was used in the production.

One day, when the worker opened the machine to clean it, a chemical fireball came out of one of the machine’s ports, burning off all of the skin on her client’s face. He also suffered injuries to his arms and lungs. 

Cheng struggled to find experts and witnesses. The semiconductor industry is globally significant; Deloitte reports the industry took in around $630 billion in revenue in 2024. “This was, and is, a highly competitive industry where no one wanted to talk about their secret methods for manufacturing and machine maintenance,” she says. “It was near impossible to find people willing to teach me about the science and engineering.”

Not to mention the highly technical concepts Cheng had to explain to a jury. She explains, “The molecular beam epitaxy is like a slushy machine. Imagine there are eight portals with different flavors to put onto a block. When you’re done using the machine, those eight different flavors are coated throughout the interior of the machine, and somebody has to clean that out. As part of the cleaning process, you have to open the machine. And when one of those flavors, phosphorus, comes in contact with the air, you can get a chemical fire that could seriously hurt you.”

The case resulted in a confidential settlement. “Pursuing technology that is improving everyone’s lives—that’s important,” Cheng says. “But don’t forget the humans who have to clean the machines.”

More recently, in 2023, Cheng won $15.3 million in a jury trial on behalf of a Sacramento college student who had a stroke and was dispatched to UC Davis Medical Center. There, ER physicians failed to activate the hospital’s stroke protocol, Cheng says, even though he had signs and symptoms of one. Instead of finding and diagnosing the stroke in one hour, as directed by the protocol, the diagnosis wasn’t made for another 26 hours. By that point, the student had permanent damage to three-quarters of the left hemisphere of his brain.

“This was a 23-year-old young man, and they assumed, ‘Oh, he’s probably on drugs.’ There was no reason to believe that,” Cheng says. “This is a kid who can’t even speak now because that part of his brain is so damaged.”

Stephen B. Walker, director of correctional health for the California Correctional Peace Officers Association, was on the jury. “One of the first things Doris asked me during [jury] selection was questions about my family,” he says. “I was taken aback, like, ‘What is this indicating to me, that she’s asking about my family?’ I should have realized then that what Doris does it tell a human story.”

For three weeks, Walker watched his preconceived notions of lawyers fade away. “Most lawyers that I’ve had interactions with have not been the most personable, humanitarian type of individuals,” he says. “It was inspiring to watch how Doris put humanity first, and coupled it with intellect and skills and hard work. She did such a phenomenal job of showing this young man and his family—and the failure of the processes and procedures that should recognize there’s a human being in the center of this.”

Walker says he followed the jury-service rules and abstained from using the internet during the trial. But one of the first things he did when he got home after the trial was to look up Cheng. 

“I had to know: Was this all a show?” he says. “It didn’t take long for me to realize, ‘Wow. This woman is for real.’ I have an affinity 

for people who are willing to stand and fight for those who are least capable of defending themselves, and to do so without pride or pretentiousness. This woman stood in the gap to do the right thing.”

As Cheng considers her career thus far, her role in a national trial bar, and the heightened profile she’ll have in the years to come as a result, she grounds herself in her No.1 rule for lawyering: Must love people.

“One of the earliest lessons I learned was not to judge anyone—including the people we’re suing. We’re not judging the person, we’re judging the conduct. And saying that conduct is wrong, and here’s how we can do better” she says. “People make mistakes … but my takeaway is, always look at everybody in their humanness. In doing so, we will bring out the best in everyone. I don’t know how else we can all live together.”