Andrew Melzer is a partner in the New York office of Sanford Heisler Sharp, LLP, a national law firm with offices in Washington, DC, New York, California, and Tennessee. He received his J.D. from NYU School of Law in 2003 and his Bachelor of Arts with Distinction in History from Yale University in 1999.
Mr. Melzer manages all aspects of complex litigation from the initial investigation to pleadings, discovery, class certification, dispositive motions, trial practice, and settlement. He represents individuals in class and collective actions involving wage and hour, discrimination, and consumer protection claims. Andrew also represents individuals in employment and qui tam cases as well as other civil rights matters.
Among other current cases, Mr. Melzer is counsel in Tian et al v. Ma Laboratories, Inc., a wage and hour action filed on behalf of hourly workers in California; da Silva Moore et al v. Publicis Groupe SA, a nationwide gender discrimination action filed on behalf of management-level employees in the public relations industry; and In re Gateway Plaza Residents Litigation, an action by tenants of a large NYC housing complex alleging breach of the implied warranty of habitability and other claims.
Mr. Melzer has acted as trial counsel in civil rights and wage and hour trials. He was trial counsel in a civil rights and wrongful death suit against Sonoma County and numerous other defendants (George v. Sonoma County, et al.) for failing to treat plaintiffs’ son’s sickle-cell anemia crisis, which eventually led to his death. The case — which went to a jury trial against certain defendants – resulted in total monetary settlements of more than $2 million, as well as an independent third-party study of the medical and correctional practices of the Sonoma County jail. Mr. Melzer also served as Trial Counsel in a wage and hour class action matter that settled post-trial (Perkins, et al. v. Southern New England Telephone Co.). The firm also settled two related cases for a combined $27 million, one of the largest recent wage and hour settlements.
Mr. Melzer has drafted briefs and petitions to several United States Courts of Appeals, the United States Supreme Court, and the California Supreme Court.
In 2013 and 2014, Mr. Melzer was selected to Super Lawyers’ New York-Metro Rising Stars list, an honor no more than 2.5 percent of a state’s lawyers receive.
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Prior to joining Sanford Heisler Sharp in November 2007, Andrew was a staff attorney at an international organization in Zurich, Switzerland, where he helped to restore lost and stolen assets to Holocaust victims and their heirs. From 2003 to 2005, he served as a judicial law clerk on the Massachusetts Appeals Court, where he clerked for Chief Justice Christopher Armstrong and legendary jurist Benjamin Kaplan – distinguished former Harvard Law professor and one of the principal architects of the Nuremberg trials. During law school, Andrew represented clients in employment and civil rights related matters and drafted a petition for rehearing en banc to the Second Circuit in a disability rights case. In the summer of 2002, Andrew was a McCleary Law Fellow at the Human Rights Campaign, the nation’s largest LGBT rights organization. Among other projects, he contributed to an amicus brief submitted by various civil rights organizations in Lawrence v. Texas.
