Jahan C. Sagafi

Jahan Sagafi is the partner in charge of the Outten & Golden LLP San Francisco office, where he represents workers in class actions asserting wage and hour, discrimination, Fair Credit Reporting Act, and other claims. He has represented classes of workers alleging race and gender discrimination, including store salespeople at Abercrombie & Fitch, restaurant workers at McCormick & Schmick’s, and financial professionals at Goldman Sachs.

He has also recovered overtime compensation, meal and rest break pay, and vacation pay for various groups of workers, such as HVAC service technicians, technical support workers at IBM, Computer Sciences Corp., Wells Fargo, JPMorgan Chase, AT&T, Cadence Design Systems, and Premera Blue Cross, security officers at Inter-Con, temp staffing workers at Adecco, hourly employees at Wal-Mart.

He currently represents call center workers alleging off-the-clock work, in-house instructors at AT&T, pregnant women at Raley’s supermarkets, counselors on military bases who were classified as independent contractors by MHN, financial professionals at Morgan Stanley, and shoppers and drivers working for Instacart.

In addition, Mr. Sagafi represents plaintiffs in appeals of class actions in state and federal courts and the U.S. Supreme Court, addressing issues such as workers’ rights, arbitration agreements, class certification, standing, unfair and deceptive practices under California’s Unfair Competition Law, and FDA preemption.

Mr. Sagafi has also represented consumers challenging widespread deceptive business practices and discrimination. For example, he has helped to recover over $1 billion* on behalf of African American and Latino customers of Toyota, Honda, and WFS, in class actions alleging that those customers were charged higher discretionary finance charge markups than white customers with similar creditworthiness.

He is also class counsel in settlements on behalf of Verizon and AT&T landline phone customers who were charged monthly fees by third-party companies without customer authorization. He has asserted the rights of DirecTV customers charged unfair and deceptive early cancellation fees, uninsured hospital patients challenging unfairly high charges, and insurance customers subjected to deceptive sales practices, among others.

In addition, Mr. Sagafi is a member of the San Francisco American Constitution Society (ACS) chapter’s Board of Advisors. In the past, he has served as a Governor of the board of the nonprofit Public Advocates, a member of the Bar Association of San Francisco (BASF) Judicial Evaluations Committee, a BASF attorney fee disputes arbitrator, Vice Chair of the board of the ACLU of Northern California, chair of the Board of the San Francisco ACS chapter, and an Executive Committee member of the California Bar Litigation Section. In addition, he has served as an organizer of ABA Labor & Employment Law Section conferences.

Prior to joining Outten & Golden, he was a partner at Lieff, Cabraser, Heimann & Bernstein, and clerked for the Honorable William W Schwarzer of the Northern District of California. Mr. Sagafi graduated from Harvard College and Harvard Law School, where he was a Senior Editor of the Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review and president of the Board of Student Advisers.