The Lawyer Standing at the Center of Some of Southern California’s Most Urgent Civil Rights Fights
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Civil rights attorney V. James DeSimone’s work often begins where someone else’s life has just been torn apart.
Recently, that meant standing beside Tucker Collins, an 18-year-old USC freshman whose eye was shot out by a Department of Homeland Security officer using some sort of less-lethal projectile. Collins, an avid videographer, was documenting a “No Kings” rally of people opposed to the very kind of state-initiated violence that left him blind and bleeding.
Tucker was not a demonstrator. He was documenting a public protest, standing 30 feet away from a fence and behind the crowd. Yet despite federal policies prohibiting shooting people in the head with these weapons, the young man was left half-blind for the rest of his life.
“He was not threatening anyone. He wasn’t attacking anyone,” DeSimone said. “They didn’t shoot him for their own protection – Tucker was shot in another overt act of repression.”
Tucker’s case is the latest in a string of people represented by DeSimone after being seriously wounded and maimed by federal and local officers shutting down public protests against the nation’s turn towards authoritarianism and away from the civil rights enshrined in the constitution.
DeSimone, who also focuses on employment discrimination, police misconduct and personal injury cases, came up representing people who did not have money, leverage or easy access to the courts.
After earning his UCLA law degree, DeSimone served as a staff attorney at Westside Legal Services in Santa Monica, where he was the lead trial lawyer for lower-income clients who could not afford representation. In 1990, he founded Schonbrun DeSimone, which grew into one of California’s best-known plaintiffs’ rights practices, before launching V. James DeSimone Law in 2015.
As a trial lawyer, DeSimone has a record of substantial verdicts and settlements from taking on cases involving police and government abuse, and employment discrimination.
He has long represented the family of Brendon Glenn, the unarmed man shot in the back by former LAPD officer Clifford Proctor in Venice, garnering a $4 million settlement for Brendon Glenn’s family. Proctor currently awaits trial on a charge of second-degree murder.
The city of Stockton in 2024 approved a $6 million settlement with the family of Shayne Sutherland in their federal wrongful death lawsuit. Sutherland, in the midst of a mental health crisis, died when two police officers handcuffed and held him face-down, applying pressure with their bodies and batons for more than eight minutes. He was 10 days shy of his 30th birthday.
In March 2016, a judge upheld a jury’s 2012 verdict of $7.4 million awarded in an employment retaliation case after an employee was terminated following an incident in which he was the victim of workplace violence. The jury awarded $2.4 million in compensatory damages and $5 million in punitive damages to punish the company and deter similar conduct.
And in 1993, DeSimone made a historic win when he successfully argued that his client, Wayne Mogilefsky, was being sexually harassed by his boss Michael Levy. Prior to that landmark published appellate decision, the only published decision in a male-on-male sexual harassment case dismissed it as “horseplay.” DeSimone’s case became a crucial step in paving the way for a 2013 California law recognizing that sexual harassment could in fact take place between persons of the same sex.
In 2009, DeSimone achieved another landmark victory in Johnson v. Cerebral Palsy Foundation, the first case holding that “me too” evidence of other victims was admissible in a discrimination case based on pregnancy discrimination.
Other successes include a $1.7 million verdict in Harris v. City of Los Angeles for a disabled man subjected to excessive force by LAPD, a $1.2 million verdict in Xue Lu v. United States, a $2.1 million false arrest verdict against Walgreens, a $3 million settlement against the Santa Monica for two women whose hands were cut while removing flex cuffs after a George Floyd protest arrest and a $4.5 million wrongful death settlement against the County of San Bernardino County.
Through the years DeSimone has been recognized as among the best plaintiff civil rights and employment discrimination attorneys in California by Super Lawyers, LawDragon, the Daily Journal and the Westside Bar Association. He has been recognized as one of Southern California’s Leading Attorneys by LA Times Studios; Best Lawyers named him “Lawyer of the Year” in Los Angeles for Civil Rights Law for 2024; and he received the CLAY Civil Rights Lawyer of the Year award in 2014.
