Rasha Gerges Shields 

After more than 20 years as a litigator, including seven as a federal prosecutor, Rasha Gerges Shields knows how to try complex civil cases.

She was, for instance, a senior member of the team representing Tesoro Oil in a $30 billion antitrust class action accusing it and seven other oil companies of conspiring to fix gasoline prices in Southern California. In September, a federal judge granted the eight companies’ summary judgment motions. Persian Gulf Inc. v. BP West Coast Products LLC, 3:15-cv-01749 (S.D. Cal., filed Aug. 6, 2015).

Shields also regularly defends companies being investigated by state attorneys general or other government entities. Currently, she is representing Walmart Inc. on charges it sold brass knuckles online. Late last month, California Attorney General Rob Bonta and three county district attorneys announced a $500,000 settlement with the giant retailer.

Sometimes she conducts investigations herself for companies or other institutions. Last spring, she led an investigation for USC into whether its school of education had been misreporting data to U.S. News & World Report to improve its rankings in the surveys of graduate schools. Her team’s 33-page report was released last April.

Internal investigations like that are generally kept confidential, “but this was a situation where USC wanted to be transparent and disclose what was involved,” she said.

Shields also is extremely active with community and professional organizations and efforts. She is a past president of the Arab American Lawyers Association of Southern California and of UCLA’s law alumni association.

She is the current president of California ChangeLawyers, the former State Bar Foundation, which awards scholarships to law students and grants to legal aid programs and efforts, among other activities.

And in February, Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass appointed Shields to the city’s Board of Police Commissioners, the five-person panel that oversees the Los Angeles Police Department, including setting department policies and adjudicating officer-involved shootings and other use-of-force incidents. “It’s a lot of work, but it’s very interesting and very impactful,” she said.

Then in March, the chief justice named her to the California appellate courts’ new Bias Prevention Committee.

Shields said she ramped up her community work markedly after the murder of George Floyd. “That was what gave me almost license to get very involved in a lot of the police reform efforts,” she said.

Those included becoming co-chair of the Los Angeles Police Commission’s Advisory Committee on Building Trust and Equity and of the LAPD’s own implementation committee. In 2021, UCLA’s chancellor asked her to help lead the university’s own policing and public safety efforts.

At the same time, she took on similar work for Jones Day, becoming part of its Constitutional Policing and Civil Justice Reform Task Force, which is active in Minneapolis and Chicago, as well as Los Angeles.

She also leads the Diversity, Inclusion & Advancement Committee in the firm’s L.A. office and co-chairs its California Lawyers of Color affinity group.

And she works with several diversity pipeline programs to mentor students. “I’m very, very passionate about diversifying the legal position,” Shields said.

— Don DeBenedictis