New consumer attorneys group president arrives at an opportune time

Micha Star Liberty is becoming president of the Consumer Attorneys of California at an opportune time Saturday. Working with a new progressive governor, many of the organization’s long-stalled legislative goals were signed into law this year.

But Liberty said she wanted to remind members outside events can derail the best-laid plans. This is what many feared when catastrophic wildfires struck two days after Gov. Gavin Newsom was elected last year.

“That’s why when people ask me about the agenda for CAOC, I kind of chuckle,” said the founding partner of Liberty Law Office in Oakland. “All good agendas fall by the wayside.”

But 2019 still turned out to be an “incredible year” for the organization, said Liberty. Newsom signed eight bills the group sponsored. This included AB 51, which bans arbitration as a condition of employment or a consumer purchase and is certain to be tested in court after it takes effect Jan. 1.

“We didn’t know what the governor was going to be willing to do this year, but we definitely set an aggressive agenda,” said the group’s outgoing president, Mike M. Arias, a partner with Arias Sanguinetti Wang & Torrijos LLP in Los Angeles. “Many of the bills were bills that Jerry Brown did not sign. We had to go back and hope we had a much more consumer- and victim-friendly governor.”

Arias noted Liberty has had an extensive history with the organization and is someone members had long seen as a potential future president.

“She’s very passionate, and she’s a team player,” Arias said.

The group’s leadership will set its legislative agenda for 2020 in the coming weeks. But Liberty said the core values haven’t changed.

“We are going to keep along some of the same traditional lines we have always advocated for,” Liberty said. “We want to make sure workers have protections and legal rights that are enforceable in court.”

Beyond possible workplace bills, she said the organization will continue to look for ways to improve civil procedures. The group could jump into fights around the costs of housing and medical care and could play a role as lawmakers debate how to address climate change.

But as is often the case, the consumer attorneys biggest fights will likely be with insurers and doctors. Liberty said the group is working to raise awareness of what she called California’s out-of-date laws on minimum levels of automotive insurance though no legislation has been proposed yet.

California’s law, passed in 1974, calls for minimum coverage of $15,000 for a single injury or death, $30,000 for multiple injuries and $5,000 in property damage. Since then, the average price of a new car has more than doubled, to about $35,000, and California has fallen into the bottom four states in terms of the coverage auto insurers must provide, according to a fact sheet from the consumer attorneys group.

This mirrors another fight taking place next year — one the consumer attorneys group is not officially involved in at this point. Earlier this fall, medical malpractice attorney Nicholas C. Rowley said he was planning to use his own money to put the Medical Injury Compensation Reform Act in front of voters.

The 1975 law limits non-economic medical negligence damages at $250,000. If Rowley’s initiative were to get on the ballot and pass, the new inflation-adjusted total would be nearly $1.2 million.

Business and doctors’ groups would be expected to spend big against the effort. They poured $58 million into stopping Proposition 46 in 2014 though Rowley and many others have said that was a flawed initiative that got hung up on a provision about drug-testing doctors.

“Something needs to be done,” Liberty said. “People differ about the right approach, but I don’t think anyone thinks the status quo should stand. We don’t get to go into the grocery store and buy a quart of milk for what it cost in 1974.”

Liberty is about the same age as these laws. She was born in San Francisco, just a few miles from where she now practices law, but she spent several years of her childhood in Hawaii. One of the best-known aspects of her career is she interned in the Bill Clinton White House at the same time as Monica Lewinsky though she said she had no knowledge of their affair at the time. She later worked for two members of Congress,

“She’s very sophisticated, both politically and legislatively,” said Nancy S. Drabble, CEO of the attorneys group. “I think that is going to be an enormous asset for consumer attorneys that Micha is so politically experienced.”

Liberty attended UC Hastings School of Law with the goal of becoming an expert in writing legislation. Instead, she opened her own firm in 2005, within four years of passing the bar, and soon made a name for herself in employment law.

While she takes other plaintiffs’ cases, she is particularly well-known for her work representing victims of sexual harassment. In fact, she will now be tasked with lobbying a Legislature she has often sued. A pair of cases on behalf of former legislative staffers brought her repeatedly to Sacramento County Superior Court, also the venue for a case filed against the former chair of the California Democratic Party.

It’s not likely, however, that she’ll stop her frequent visits to Sacramento once her year as president is up. Liberty already has a pair of federal cases against school districts preparing to go to trial in the Eastern District of California in 2021. After years as a trial attorney, she said she has started to think of such far-off dates as “soonish.”

“Well, soon for a lawyer,” Liberty joked. “In the law, 90 days can be a lifetime or the blink of an eye. It just depends on what’s happening in those 90 days.”