Brett M. Rubin
Brett M. Rubin received his BA in Philosophy from the University of California, Los Angeles, and his Juris Doctorate from the University of California, Hastings College of the Law. At Hastings, he was a member of the Hastings International and Comparative Law Review and received the American Jurisprudence Award in Legal Writing and Research. He also received the CALI Award for Excellence as the top student in Trial Advocacy. He has twice been selected by Thompson/Reuters Super Lawyers as a Rising Star in the areas of Labor and Employment Law, an honor reserved for only the top 2 1/2% of attorneys in the state during their first 10 years of practice, as determined by their peers.
Since 1998, Mr. Rubin has worked at firms specializing in domestic and international transactional work and civil litigation. He started his career working on product liability cases. In that capacity, he assisted in the representation of plaintiffs with malignant mesothelioma caused by exposure to asbestos. One of these ultimately settled his case for what was, at the time, the largest single plaintiff pre-trial settlement in history. His work in developing the case for liability and damages against one of the largest privately held companies in the country has been utilized by numerous firms throughout the United States to obtain multi-million dollar Plaintiff's verdicts.
Since 2000, Mr. Rubin has handled litigation involving employment, business, real estate, securities fraud, intellectual property, trade libel, and other forms of defamation, landlord-tenant disputes, and professional malpractice. His practice has ranged from small landlord-tenant, contract and wage disputes with as little as $10,000 at issue, to multi-million dollar securities fraud, RICO, unfair business practices, and intellectual property suits. In 2003, he helped to obtain a $4.7 million arbitration award in a multi-forum international theft of trade secret case. In 2004, he represented a textile designer against more than two dozen of the largest retailers in the world in more than 40 federal copyright violation cases.
Mr. Rubin has successfully assisted plaintiffs and defendants in both the public and private sector in sexual harassment, race and gender discrimination, and wage & hour suits. He began representing workers seeking to collect unpaid overtime wages as a member of the Hastings Civil Justice Clinic in 1997. Since then, he has recovered unpaid wages for numerous plaintiffs, from minimum wage earners through high level executives owed in excess of $75,000 in bonuses alone. He has also represented both plaintiffs and defendants in representative wage actions under California's unfair business practices law and Labor Code § 2699, which permits aggrieved employees to seek recovery on behalf of all similarly situated employees of a company. He has experience in federal and state courts and a number of different alternative dispute resolution forums.
In recent years, Mr. Rubin has also successfully handled several high-value judgment enforcement actions and has obtained positive rulings in appeals brought before both state and federal Courts of Appeal.
Mr. Rubin is a member of the State Bar of California, and the Labor & Employment Section of the California State Bar. He is admitted to practice before the courts of California, the United States District Court, Central District of California, and the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. He is a co-author of Advanced Legal Drafting for California Paralegals (2001), and the author of GAF Corporation: The Case for Liability and Punitive Damages, published by the 2000 Plaintiff's Asbestos Lawyers Seminar.