Bryan Schwartz Named Top 75 Labor & Employment Lawyers in California by the Daily Journal

Bryan Schwartz Named Top 75 Labor & Employment Lawyers in California by the Daily Journal

Source: Daily Journal, Top Labor & Employment Lawyers 2025

Bryan Schwartz has built a 25-year career on fighting for workplace justice, securing tens of millions of dollars for employees nationwide through class actions, discrimination suits and individual employment matters.

“What drew me to the field is what still motivates me today—the desire to work toward social justice, to advance our multicultural society in a way where everyone has an opportunity to succeed,” Schwartz said.

His recent victories demonstrate the scope of his impact on workers’ rights. In May 2024, Schwartz won class certification for more than 16,500 Black workers who suffered race harassment, including use of racial slurs, at the Tesla’s Fremont factory. Legal experts believe this represents the largest harassment class ever certified. Vaughn et al. v. Tesla, Inc. et al. RG17882082 (Alameda Co. Sup. Ct., filed Nov. 13, 2017).

The Tesla case also yielded a significant legal precedent. In January 2023, Schwartz and his co-counsel won an appeal that established for the first time that a public injunction claim lies under the Fair Employment and Housing Act, which cannot be compelled to individual arbitration. The case attracted national media attention, with coverage in the New York Times and Los Angeles Times.

In a separate victory in March 2023, Schwartz secured a $37.5 million settlement against the State Department. Meyer et al. v. Blinked, 531-2015-00092X (EEOC, filed Jan. 8, 2007).

The case, which took nearly 17 years to resolve, involved 244 individuals who were denied entry to the career Foreign Service due to disabilities. The settlement resulted in immediate policy changes, opening Foreign Service careers to disabled individuals for the first time in decades and creating new job opportunities for more than 100 people.

The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission praised the landmark settlement, noting that “without the tireless efforts of lead class counsel Bryan Schwartz, who has worked toward a resolution in this case with no compensation for more than 16 years, this settlement would not have occurred.”

Schwartz also champions individual workers facing discrimination. In May 2023, he won a $2 million jury verdict for a deaf FedEx package handler who was repeatedly denied reasonable accommodations. The case involved a part-time worker who was denied live interpreters for safety meetings and video remote interpreting for daily meetings that other employees attended.

The work comes with challenges. “The long delays in contingency cases like the Meyer State Department disability class action and the Vaughn v. Tesla race harassment class action, against some of the biggest defendants in the country pressing every angle, always test our resolve,” Schwartz explained. 

Despite these obstacles, Schwartz remains committed to his clients and causes. “I never give up on a righteous case, as long as there is a chance of achieving justice,” he said. 

Schwartz has also become a vocal critic of forced arbitration in employment disputes. “Forced, predispute, individual arbitration is the bane of our existence because fights about arbitration consume massive resources on all sides in many cases, and arbitration is not, ultimately, a cheaper or faster – and certainly not a fairer – way to resolve employment disputes,” he said.