Jahan Sagafi

JAHAN C. SAGAFI is the partner in charge of the Outten & Golden San Francisco office, where represents employees in class actions asserting wage and hour, discrimination, 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 technical support workers at IBM, Computer Sciences Corp., Wells Fargo, JPMorgan Chase, AT&T, Cadence Design Systems, and Premera Blue Cross (with total settlements in those cases over $100 million*), security officers at Inter-Con, temp staffing workers at Adecco, hourly employees at Wal-Mart.  He currently represents MFLCs who support military servicepeople and were classified as independent contractors by MHN, seeking overtime pay and other benefits.

Mr. Sagafi also represents 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 (a practice called “cramming”).  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 represents plaintiffs in appeals of class actions in state and federal courts, addressing issues such as workers’ rights, arbitration agreements, class certification, standing, unfair and deceptive practices under California’s Unfair Competition Law, and FDA preemption. 

Active in the San Francisco Bay Area and national legal communities, Mr. Sagafi has served on several boards.  He is a Governor of the board of Public Advocates, where he chairs the Development and Communications Committee.  He is a member of the Bar Association of San Francisco (BASF) Judicial Evaluations Committee.  He has also served on the boards of the ACLU of Northern California (Executive Committee and Chair of Legal Committee) and the San Francisco American Constitution Society (ACS) chapter (Chair of board).  In addition, he has served as an organizer of ABA Labor & Employment Law Section conferences, as an Executive Committee member of the California Bar Litigation Section, as a volunteer attorney with BASF’s Homeless Advocacy Project, and as a volunteer arbitrator of attorney fee disputes for BASF.  Mr. Sagafi has received the Community Justice Award from Centro Legal De La Raza and has been recognized as a "Rising Star for Northern California" by Super Lawyers and a “Top 20 Under 40” lawyer by the Daily Journal in California. 

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. 

Mr. Sagafi is admitted to practice in California, the District Courts for the Northern, Eastern, and Central Districts of California, the Southern District of New York, and the Second, Ninth, and Eleventh Circuit Courts of Appeals.