Elise R. Sanguinetti 

Elise R. Sanguinetti is a name partner, co-founder and plaintiff-side civil litigator at Arias Sanguinetti Wang & Torrijos LLP. She represents clients in consumer class actions, employment law litigation and personal injury and wrongful death cases.

In 2022, she won the Marvin E. Lewis Award from the Consumer Attorneys of California for excellence in trial advocacy.

In mid-May, Sanguinetti was in Washington, D.C., as part of a 150-female trial lawyer delegation on behalf of the women’s caucus of the American Association for Justice. They were there to lobby Congress for the passage of legislation that would ban forced arbitration in racial bias cases.

Sanguinetti, a past president of the AAJ, said the group makes a lobbying trek to the Capitol every other year. “Arbitration can be positive, but when it’s done in secret over civil rights issues, it perpetuates the problem.” The bill in question, S 1408 and HR 3038, is known as the Ending Forced Arbitration of Racial Discrimination Act of 2023.

“There’s no pro-justice majority in the House right now,” she said, assessing the bill’s prospects, “but the Senate is looking good.”

Earlier this year, Sanguinetti attained a $28.03 million settlement for a couple after the husband was rendered quadriplegic in a trucking accident in San Joaquin County. “We fought to keep the broker of the goods in the case because the driver had minimal insurance,” she said. The case settled after the court denied the defendant’s summary judgment motion. Under the terms of the deal, the defendant’s name remains confidential.

In another matter, Sanguinetti settled a wrongful death matter for $950,000 even before filing a complaint in Alameda County Superior Court. She represented the teenage daughter of a man who died when his vehicle ran into the rear of a big rig that suddenly entered the roadway at 12 miles per hour in a 60-mile-per-hour zone. The unfiled case was to have been captioned Elkins v. Dhaliwal Bros. Trucking.

The deal was significant because the crash happened in North Carolina, where the law holds that if a plaintiff is even 1% at fault, no damages recovery is allowed. “We’ve had a lot of experience in trucking cases,” Sanguinetti said.

She’s also representing parties in several cases against Tesla Inc. over product liability claims. “There are various product defects at issue,” he said. In one case, her client is the surviving spouse of a woman who was killed while using the car’s autosteer and traffic-aware cruise control features. The car crashed into a firetruck. Monet v. Tesla Inc., 5:22-cv-00681 (N.D. Cal., filed Feb. 2, 2022).

“Those autopilots tend to be Tesla’s biggest problem right now,” Sanguinetti said.

— John Roemer