Felicia Gilbert is the co-managing partner of Sanford Heisler Sharp’s San Francisco and Palo Alto offices. In this key role, Felicia leads a diverse team of attorneys and legal assistants, including mentoring many of them in the individual and class action matters for which the firm is renowned. In addition to office management and mentoring, she personally handles a demanding caseload of litigation involving race, gender and pregnancy discrimination in contentious employment matters on behalf of plaintiffs.
Felicia has built a successful employment practice representing individuals and classes in discrimination matters, where she manages each case from the ground up and strives tirelessly to maximize the attainment of her clients’ desired outcomes. A hallmark of her approach is a strong ability to build rapport and sustain the trust of her clients and colleagues while pushing every litigation matter and settlement to its limit with fearlessness and creativity.
Felicia has successfully resolved numerous cases pre-suit, including matters against law firms, tech companies, pharmaceutical companies, academic institutions, and medical institutions. In the recent past, Felicia has settled two individual employment discrimination cases against law firms – one involving sexual harassment claims, the other involving retaliation claims. She has made a significant contribution to the firm’s reputation as the go-to firm for plaintiffs looking to file claims against law firms where they once worked.
Felicia recently filed Horn v. Kraft Heinz, a $30 million race discrimination, hostile work environment, retaliation, and wrongful termination civil action in the Eastern District of California against Kraft Heinz Foods Company on behalf of three former employees at the company’s Tulare, California dairy facility.
She also represented Julia Vega in an individual gender discrimination and retaliation case, Julia Vega v. Honeywell International, in the Southern District of California, that recently settled.
She was also a member of the firm’s team representing Democratic lawmakers who filed a high-profile amicus brief backing Miami in two fair housing lawsuits in late 2016 – Bank of America Corp v. City of Miami and Wells Fargo & Co. v. City of Miami.
Before joining Sanford Heisler Sharp in 2016, Felicia was an associate at Morrison & Foerster, LLP, where her practice involved a variety of complex commercial litigation matters in both federal and state courts. During her tenure there, she was a member of the trial team named 2013 “Attorneys of the Year” in civil rights law by California Lawyer Magazine for representing the family of an unarmed man fatally shot by a police officer in a Section 1983 federal civil rights lawsuit against a California municipality.
While at Columbia Law School, Felicia served on the Journal of Law and Social Problems and as a Teaching Fellow on the Columbia Law School Moot Court Editorial Board. As part of Columbia Law School’s Child Advocacy Clinic, she helped design a research protocol for adolescent representation and provided legal assistance to young adults transitioning out of foster care. She also interned with the Criminal Appeals Bureau of the Legal Aid Society.
Updated Sep 2022
