Brian Gearinger showed up for coffee on a recent morning rocking a scarlet pullover from Denison University in Ohio, where he majored in political science and started four years at offensive tackle for the Big Red football team.
If you have 20 minutes to spare, ask him about the throwback, single-wing offense run by then-Denison head coach Keith Piper, who guided the team to an undefeated regular season in 1985, Gearinger’s senior year.
“It’s an unbalanced line with a lot of the shotgun running plays,” said Gearinger, 61, just getting warmed up. Linemen, he added, needed to be mobile and versatile. “Every position pulled.”
The Akron native went from Denison to the University of Michigan Law School — “I had to be a quiet Ohio State fan, up in Ann Arbor” — before embarking on the 3½-decade law career that has showcased a similar versatility.
After nine years in corporate law, then six as a San Francisco deputy city attorney, he opened an office in Santa Rosa in 2008, working as a solo practitioner. In 2019 he took on a notable civil rights case that led to Gearinger, along with the two lawyers who worked with him as co-counsel, being named California’s 2025 Consumer Attorneys of the Year.
That case, Loggervale v. Alameda County, involved a Black mother and her two daughters, who were 19 and 17 at the time. After driving all night from Las Vegas to get the older daughter to her statistics exam at Berkeley Community College, they stopped at a Starbucks in Castro Valley.
While parked, they were approached by deputies from the Alameda County Sheriff’s Office, who were searching for suspects in a series of recent car break-ins. The suspects had been described as Black males, which didn’t stop one of the deputies from asking the mother, Aasylei Loggervale, for her identification.
After asking the deputy what she had done that would require her to produce her ID, she chose not to hand it over, which was her right. The Fourth Amendment of the Constitution protects citizens from “unreasonable searches and seizures.”
The deputy called for backup, and ordered mother and daughters handcuffed. They were put in separate patrol cars and detained for 90 minutes before being released.
They were not charged with a crime or violation of the vehicle code.
The Loggervales reached out to the San Francisco-based attorney Joseph May, who often collaborated with Gearinger, and who then invited the Santa Rosan to be co-counsel on the case they dubbed “parking while Black.”
The federal lawsuit they filed accused the deputies of false arrest, invasion of privacy and racial bias.
Alameda County brought in outside counsel, a defense attorney who “made everything contentious,” Gearinger said.
In their first phone call with that lawyer, May recalled, “he was just dismissive, and ridiculed us and our clients.”
At a court-ordered settlement conference in 2021, the plaintiffs asked for $250,000 per person, “which means,” Gearinger said, “we probably would have settled for $150,000” per plaintiff.
The defense countered with an offer of $2,500 per person — “Which, in legal terms,” he said, “means ‘F— you.’”
Before the trial, Gearinger and May added a third lawyer to their team. Craig Peters, whose offices are in San Francisco and who lives in the city of Sonoma, and is widely regarded as one of the top trial attorneys in California. His superpowers, Gearinger said, include jury selection, along with opening and closing arguments.
Following a five-day trial in 2023, a federal jury in San Francisco agreed that the sheriff’s deputies had acted without “reasonable suspicion,” and violated the Loggervales’ civil rights.
They awarded the women a total of $8.25 million.
The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals denied the county’s appeal. The final settlement, including that judgment plus lawyers’ fees and interest, came in at $11.26 million.
The $8.25 million award was one of the largest in a civil rights case not involving incarceration or significant physical harm — a national benchmark, Gearinger hopes, that will serve as a further deterrent to race-based policing.
“If this had been a white woman with her white daughters,” he said, “it never would’ve happened.”
Drawn to unsung but key role
Solo practitioner though he may be, Gearinger often works with other attorneys, for a variety of reasons.
Teaming up on a case allows them to bounce strategies and ideas off one another, and to “hedge the risk” when taking on “contingency fee” cases. As Gearinger explains on his website, “we can better absorb the loss of our time and costs if it is a shared risk.”
Guided by his inner offensive lineman, Gearinger gravitated to the unglamorous tasks in his most acclaimed case: “defending” depositions of the Loggervales — that is, accompanying and protecting them during questioning by opposing counsel, and filing motions to compel discovery when the defense stonewalled them, which happened five times.
Each time, the judge ruled in Gearinger’s favor.
He also served as a kind of case manager, May recalled, “steering the ship, making sure deadlines were being met, making sure we’re not getting lost.”
That allowed May to play to his strengths. “If there was a motion in the case, I did the research, that was my main thing,” he recalled, “although Brian would pick up big chunks of those along the way.”
Toggling from football parlance to baseball, Gearinger described May as “a five-tool player. He might be the best attorney I’ve ever met.”
Those two did the grunt work to get the case to trial, a three-year slog that entailed 15 depositions, and required responses to hundreds of “requests for admission.” The pair also successfully opposed the defense’s motion to dismiss the complaint, and its motion for summary judgment.
When the trial arrived, it was Peters’ time to shine. “I call him the trial assassin,” Gearinger said. “He’s the most talented trial lawyer I’ve ever seen.”
In his closing statement, Peters brought up the quiet courage of Rosa Parks, who in 1955 refused to move from her seat on a bus in Montgomery, Alabama, in defiance of Jim Crow racial segregation laws.
By standing her ground, refusing to turn over her license, knowing she’d done nothing wrong, Aasylei Loggervale had followed in Parks’ footsteps, Peters suggested.
He invoked Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s reminder that “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”
But how does it bend, he asked the jury, before answering his own question:
“Because people are each doing their part. Juries are doing their parts.”
After deliberating for 16 hours, the jury ruled unanimously in favor of the Loggervales.
No easy victory
The judgment cleared, and the plaintiffs got paid, in late December of 2024 — five years after May and Gearinger met the Loggervales. “The United States entered and won World War II in less time than it took us to resolve this case,” Gearinger said.
To his non-lawyer friends who needle him for “making so much money,” Gearinger said, “I tell them, ‘You try working for five years without getting paid — with the chance that you’ll never get paid.’”
It helps to have, as Gearinger does, a wife who is a Kaiser physician. But until the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the jury’s verdict in the Loggervale case, he said, “zero was always on the table.”
But they won, and were celebrated at the Consumer Attorneys of California’s annual banquet.
Glancing at the trophy he got that night, Gearinger summed up his career in six words:
“I’m a 35-year, overnight sensation.”
You can reach Staff Writer Austin Murphy at austin.murphy@pressdemocrat.com or on Twitter @ausmurph88.