Jeremy Heisler is Vice Chairman and a Founding Partner of Sanford Heisler Sharp, LLP, a national law firm with offices in Washington, DC, New York, San Francisco, San Diego, and Nashville. He received his law degree, magna cum laude, from Brooklyn Law School in 1979.
Throughout his legal career of more than thirty years, Mr. Heisler has had notable success in employment class actions and complex multi-party and multi-state litigation, producing more than $400 million in benefits to class members. Jeremy has established leading employment law precedents, including the expansion of the rights of wrongfully discharged employees. He has prevailed in novel and groundbreaking litigation against some of the largest companies in the nation.
Mr. Heisler’s most recent victory came in In Re Novartis Wage and Hour Litigation. The Second Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that sales representatives employed by pharmaceutical giant Novartis Pharmaceuticals Corporation were entitled to overtime pay under federal, New York and California law. As a direct result of this decision, Novartis and plaintiffs reached a $99 million class-wide settlement, the largest wage and hour settlement in 2012.
Jeremy was also instrumental in spearheading a $28 million settlement in a suit charging that three AT&T subsidiaries wrongfully denied overtime pay to a class of First-Level Managers.
Additionally, Jeremy won class certification for a group of female sales representatives who alleged that their employer engaged in gender discrimination in Velez v. Novartis. A jury ultimately returned a $250 million verdict against the company—the largest gender discrimination award in United States history and one of the five largest ever.
Jeremy recently co-authored an amicus brief for the U.S. Supreme Court on behalf of women’s rights organizations and individuals in Mach Mining v. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, a major decision on whether and how federal courts should review the EEOC’s methods of informal dispute resolution in discrimination cases.
Mr. Heisler’s successes have been as consistent as they are varied. He has prosecuted many significant class actions, including a case against G.E. Capital with a $19.2 million settlement (consumers were overcharged with illegal fees), and a case against a major leasing company with a $15 million settlement (consumers were defrauded).
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Mr. Heisler served as Law Clerk for a major Appellate Court in New York, where he drafted bench memoranda and judicial opinions on appeals ranging from constitutional law actions and criminal prosecutions to multi-million dollar real estate litigation.
