Micha Starr Liberty

There’s regular exhaustion, and then there’s what happened to Micha Star Liberty near the beginning of the pandemic last year.

“I was traveling so much for work, burning the candles at both ends and preparing for back-to-back trials,” said the founder of Liberty Law Office in Oakland. “The week the state was shutting down, I collapsed face-first in a hotel room in Wyoming from exhaustion and had to be flown back to the Bay Area for emergency reconstructive surgery.”

Liberty wasn’t just juggling her standard load of sexual harassment and retaliation cases. She was also early in her term as president of the Consumer Attorneys of California. Even as she was being rolled into the operating room, she was on the phone with the organization’s CEO, Nancy Drabble, discussing how they would handle the oncoming crisis.

“And from there things got busy,” Liberty added.

The pandemic sidelined most of the organization’s typically ambitious legislative agenda in 2020. Lawmakers reintroduced several bills this year, including measures around policing, civil rights and product safety.

Instead, Liberty spent much of the year focused on Gov. Gavin Newsom’s emergency orders and getting courts as operational as possible. While civil calendars across the state are still backed up for months or years, the pandemic also helped catapult the court system years into the future with new rules and funding to allow for remote hearings and depositions, which should help courts operate more efficiently.

These days, Liberty’s focus is fully back on her day job, which often involves heart-wrenching sexual abuse cases. She’s won recent cases and worked to negotiate settlements for several students who suffered sexual assaults on school campuses, including multiple special needs children.

She said she negotiated a “six-figure” settlement for a University of California professor who was sexually harassed and retaliated against. Liberty also continues to serve on several boards and is the current president of the Western Trial Lawyers Association.

“Last year was not what anyone expected or was prepared for,” Liberty said. “As difficult as it was, there is so much I cherished both personally and professionally.”

— Malcolm Maclachlan