Qiaojing Ella Zheng

Sanford Heisler Sharp
• Palo Alto


When Ella Zheng joined Sanford Heisler Sharp as an associate at the end of 2014, she already knew that there was a great demand for attorneys with diverse cultural understanding and language skills. "But in reality, very few attorneys can provide such service to the community," she said.


A native of China and a graduate of Zhejiang University's law program there, Zheng has that understanding and skill. So, a few years later, she launched Sanford Heisler's Asian American litigation and finance practice group and was named its chair. Last year, she also was named managing partner of the firm's San Francisco and Palo Alto offices.


The goal of her practice group "is to really utilize our attorneys' and staff's cultural understanding and language skills to help members in the [Asian American, Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander] communities ... resolve employment disputes, represent them in fraud cases, represent them in financial mismanagement cases [and] all sorts of disputes against powerful corporate interests," Zheng said.


Representing employees in individual and collective litigation makes up about 70% of her practice; qui tam actions are most of the rest. A good portion of her clients are Asian Americans or others with claims against Chinese or Asian American businesses.


Many allege discrimination by multinational companies operating in both China and the U.S., she said. "Because of our unique knowledge and understanding of how those cross-border multinational businesses work [we can] ... convince the companies to compensate the workers."


Zheng recently settled a class action and PAGA case on behalf of 1,400 delivery drivers for a major supplier of Asian food items directly to consumers. The lawsuit alleged Labor Code and OSHA violations, misclassification, wage-and-hour problems and more. Song. v. Weee! Logistics, Inc, 23-CV-029846 (Ala. Super. Ct., filed March 23, 2023).


It also accused the company of requiring some workers to pay management fees to receive assignments. "I've never seen this kind of pattern with other businesses in the United States. That's why this case is sort of a milestone case of fraud," Zheng said.


Weee! has since reclassified all its drivers as employees. The parties agreed to a settlement in November and are now ironing out details.


Zheng is representing the former general counsel of a start-up tech company who accuses it of denying her promised equity and pay and then terminating her. "We've seen this happen again and again in tech companies in Silicon Valley." Zhang v. Reliance Memory Inc., 23CV415836 (Sta. Clara Super. Ct., filed May 2, 2023).


In a very unusual matter, she and the firm obtained a federal court order allowing a Chinese company to pursue a Chinese court's judgment against a Chinese American entrepreneur. It was one of only a few times a U.S. court has agreed to domesticate a Chinese judgment, she said.


Not all her work entails lawsuits. "A significant portion of our practice is to represent the workers against the corporate interest through settlement negotiation," Zheng said. "We have been particularly successful in that effort."