Richard M. Pearl

Richard M. Pearl (he/his) is the Principal of the Law Offices of Richard M. Pearl in Berkeley, California. He received his J.D. degree from Boalt Hall School of Law in Berkeley in 1969 and was admitted to both the Georgia and California State Bars in 1970. For the past thirty-plus years, his practice has focused on cases involving reasonable attorneys’ fees, either court-awarded, claimed as damages, or at issue in attorney-client disputes. He is the author of California Attorney Fee Awards, 3d Ed., published by California’s Continuing Education of the Bar in 2010, and updated annually. As an expert witness on fees, his testimony has been accepted by innumerable courts and arbitrators including Kerkeles v. City of San Jose, 243 Cal. App. 4th 88, 96, 105 (2015) and Wit v. United Behav. Health, 578 F.Supp.3d 1060, 1079 (N.D. Cal. 2022). He also has been appellate counsel in many of the leading cases on attorneys’ fees in both the California and federal courts, including Flannery v. Prentice, 26 Cal.4th 572 (2001), Graham v. DaimlerChrylser Corp., 34 Cal.4th 553 (2004), Robles v. EDD, 38 Cal.App.5th 191 (2019) in the California courts and Davis v. City & County of San Francisco, 976 F.2d 1536 (9th Cir. 1992), Mangold v. Public Utilities Commn., 67 F.3d 1470 (9th Cir. 1995), and Camacho v. Bridgeport Financial, Inc., 523 F.3d 973 (9th Cir. 2008) in the federal courts.

Todd Gluckman

Todd Gluckman graduated from Cornell University Law School in 2005, clerked for a judge in the United States District Court for the District of Arizona, and then worked as a commercial litigator at White & Case LLP. In 2011, he joined Terris, Pravlik & Millian, LLP, a public interest law firm in DC. Todd practices civil rights litigation and focuses on disability discrimination. He is lead counsel or co-counsel in three complex disability rights cases seeking systemic relief. In all three cases (two for plaintiff classes and one for a Protection and Advocacy System), the Plaintiffs have achieved the relief they sought through either an injunction or consent decree. In addition to his disability discrimination work, Todd is litigating a number of Freedom of Information Act cases and has developed an expertise in class certification and attorneys’ fees issues. All of Todd’s cases involve fee-shifting statutes.

Cynthia Rice

Cynthia L. Rice (she her) is the Legal Director for Disability Law United, working on cases addressing the intersection of disability rights with immigration, education, shelter, employment, and access to public services.  Throughout her career she has served as a public interest attorney and specialized in Labor and Employment rights and Education Advocacy in private practice and as a legal aid attorney for Community Legal Services (now Legal Services of Santa Clara County) Marin County Legal Aid and as a Director of Litigation, Advocacy and Training for California Rural Legal Assistance (CRLA) and a part-time project director for the California Rural Legal Assistance Foundation Labor and Civil Rights Litigation Project.

Rice has litigated cases against private employers, school districts and a variety of state agencies and local agencies. She has appeared before the California Supreme Court and various courts of appeals bringing about systemic change, and recovery attorneys' fees. She has testified before various legislative committees and administrative boards, and provided technical assistance to lobbyists and legislators on a variety of education, civil rights and labor bills  

She received her B.A. from the University of Colorado in 1976 and moved to California to attend law school at Santa Clara University School of Law, where she received her J.D. in 1979. She was admitted to the California Bar in 1979 and to the Hawaii Bar in 1995.

Jennifer Klar

Jennifer I. Klar has been a partner at Relman, Dane & Colfax since 2011. Ms. Klar’s civil rights practice focuses on complex civil rights litigation, including class actions, multi-plaintiff cases, and matters with significant discovery. For more than a decade, she led a team representing a nationwide class of African-American Special Agents of the United States Secret Service claiming racial discrimination with respect to promotion by the Secret Service. The parties ultimately reached a settlement that included monetary relief of $24 million and wide-ranging changes to the Secret Service’s promotions practices. Ms. Klar has successfully tried numerous cases, including a victory on behalf of 67 African-American residents of Zanesville, Ohio denied water service on the basis of race for nearly 50 years, five African-American officers of the Washington, D.C., Metropolitan Police Department retaliated against by their employer, and an African-American couple whose landlord removed and burned all their belongings while they were out of town. Ms. Klar has a specific interest in civil discovery and is a frequent presenter on discovery topics. Ms. Klar has received several honors for her work in the area of civil rights. She has twice been named a finalist for Public Justice’s “Trial Lawyer of the Year,” was chosen as the Metropolitan Washington Employment Lawyers Association’s Lawyer of the Year, and is listed in many best civil rights lawyers publications.