Andre M. Mura

As lead trial counsel for single-family water customers in Patz v. City of San Diego, Andre M. Mura examined the studies behind the city's tiered rates. California's voter-enacted constitutional limits prohibited charging a property more than its proportional cost of service. The city therefore had to justify the amounts assigned to different levels of household use, including the assumptions about water supply, demand and delivery on which its consultants relied.

One disputed assumption assigned cheaper local water to the lowest tier and more expensive supplies to higher tiers. The sources were mixed in reservoirs before delivery, however, and the city's expert acknowledged that local supplies could not cover all first-tier use and were not delivered exclusively to those customers. The plaintiffs also challenged multipliers intended to account for peak demand when the city lacked time-of-use data establishing how the customer groups contributed to those peaks. Mura's team tested the cost studies against the utility's actual supply and delivery system.

The trial produced a $79.5 million judgment in 2022. Mura successfully defended the liability finding on appeal and litigated the case on remand. After the parties reached a settlement in principle, San Diego authorized a $40 million settlement on September 2, 2026. A final-approval hearing is scheduled for December 11, 2026.

Appellate Work and Trial Preparation

Mura graduated from Williams College and earned his law degree at the George Washington University Law School in 2004. As senior litigation counsel at the Center for Constitutional Litigation in Washington, he represented plaintiffs in state supreme courts and federal appellate courts, challenging legislative and doctrinal restrictions on civil remedies. He later joined Gibbs Law Group in Oakland, where he combined that appellate work with complex trial litigation. He became a partner in 2015, and the firm adopted the name Gibbs Mura, A Law Group, in 2025.

His appellate briefing in De La Torre v. CashCall addressed a different limit on consumer remedies. The loans at issue included $2,600 loans carrying annual interest rates of 96 percent. Under the law then in force, loans of $2,500 or more had no numerical interest-rate ceiling. Mura and his colleagues argued that the absence of a ceiling did not eliminate the courts' authority to examine whether a loan term was unconscionable.

In 2018, the California Supreme Court unanimously agreed that such a challenge could proceed. It required attention to the loan and the circumstances in which it was made, rather than treating the absence of a statutory cap as an exemption from review. The court answered the legal question without itself deciding that every 96 percent loan was unlawful.

Changing the Collection of Personal Data

In Brooks v. Thomson Reuters, Mura represented Californians who alleged that their personal information, including addresses and associations, had been gathered without their knowledge or consent. Thomson Reuters sold third parties access to that information through its CLEAR search platform. Mura and Geoffrey Graber negotiated a settlement providing $27.5 million and changes to the product. The court appointed them as settlement class counsel and granted final approval on February 21, 2025.

The agreement required improvements to the process for reviewing and deleting personal information from CLEAR, clearer explanations of how information was used, and changes to product settings and management practices. Those terms addressed consumers' control over information already collected, alongside compensation for the class.

Mura had also served as co-lead counsel in the Vizio consumer-privacy litigation, which alleged that smart televisions collected and sold viewing histories and digital identifiers without informed consent. He helped negotiate a $17 million fund, deletion of the contested viewing data and limits on future collection requiring consent after prominent notice. Discussing that agreement, he emphasized both the compensation and the changes giving viewers a choice about collection. The separate First American data-exposure case prompted his 2019 statement that consumers did not deserve for their personal information to be treated so recklessly.

Briefing Within a Trial Team

Courts appointed Mura to the plaintiffs' law-and-briefing committee in the 3M Combat Arms earplug litigation, the largest multidistrict litigation in American history. He also participated in bellwether trial teams representing service members and veterans who alleged that defective earplugs had damaged their hearing. In the Taxotere litigation, he served on the plaintiffs' steering committee, co-chaired law and briefing, and participated in a federal jury trial involving breast-cancer survivors who alleged permanent hair loss after using the chemotherapy drug.

His teaching has covered class actions, discovery and legal writing, including pretrial writing for newer lawyers. He serves on the boards of the Impact Fund, which finances public-interest class actions, and Berkeley Law's Civil Justice Research Initiative. He is a fellow of the American Bar Foundation, a member of the National Center for State Courts' Lawyers Committee and a past chair of the American Association for Justice's LGBT Caucus.

Mura has also served as president of the National Civil Justice Institute, the research and education organization devoted to access to civil justice. For 2026–2027, he serves as its immediate past president. He also participated in a May 2026 symposium on secrecy and transparency in civil litigation at Stanford Law School.

Health Data and Social-Media Discovery

In the Meta Pixel healthcare-data privacy litigation, Mura serves on the plaintiffs' executive committee. Patients allege that a tracking tool transmitted their activity in medical portals to a social network without consent. He also serves in plaintiffs' steering committee leadership in the social-media adolescent-addiction litigation, representing children and families. His responsibilities include law and briefing and managing discovery concerning the TikTok defendants.