San Francisco boutique Kerr & Wagstaffe enjoys the flexibility to pursue a variety of claims across a broad and diverse range of practice areas and industries, all with elements that demonstrate its fluency with California-specific issues and law. Name partner James Wagstaffe is a venerated figure in the Northern California legal community, with peers referring to him as “extremely professional, ethical and genuinely decent.” Wagstaffe lays claim to several recent triumphs. In one recent matter, from February 2017, a unanimous federal jury in San Francisco found that Bio-Rad Laboratories, illegally fired its former General Counsel, firm client Sanford Wadler, in retaliation for blowing the whistle on what he reasonably believed were violations of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. The jury ultimately awarded Wadler $2.96 million in back pay (which is doubled under the Dodd-Frank Act for a total of $5.92 million) and an additional $5 million in punitive damages. In another matter Wagstaffe represented the California State Bar in a matter concerning a 2013 California Supreme Court ruling that the State Bar should disclose demographic and academic information requested by law professors about bar applicants, provided that the data be provided in a way that protected individual applicants’ privacy. As counsel for a UCLA law professor, Wagstaffe was able to secure a subsequent trial court victory in 2016, proving to the court that the data sought by petitioners in the case could be used to identify individuals, and that the privacy protection model the petitioners used were insufficient to fully protect bar applicants, especially those of different ethnicities and backgrounds. An appreciative client of the firm raves, “I received outstanding professional legal services in a defamation case against a local internet news/blog site. James Wagstaffe successfully represented myself and my company, which resulted in $1.1 million judgment against the site.” Another client testifies, “James Wagstaffe represented myself and company through eight days of grueling and constant ostentatious displays of mis-truth by the defendants.”
