Eve H. Cervantez
Data Breach · Pay Equity · Civil Rights
“The jobs do not have to be identical.
What an Institution Does With What It Knows
Eve H. Cervantez’s cases examine how institutions use the records they keep—from health-plan files and pay systems to a customer’s age—and seek remedies fitted to the way each system produced harm.
The Power Inside a Record
A record can look administrative until an institution acts through it. A health insurer stores the identifiers that make a person vulnerable after a breach. An employer assigns levels and pay across thousands of workers. A subscription service links age to price. In Eve H. Cervantez’s litigation, those records often reveal where the challenged decision was made, repeated, and distributed across a class.
Cervantez is a partner at Altshuler Berzon in San Francisco, where she primarily represents workers and consumers in class actions involving employment discrimination, wages, privacy, and civil rights. She earned her bachelor’s degree from Washington University and her law degree from Harvard Law School, where she served as an editor of the Harvard Law Review. After clerking for Judge Charles A. Legge of the United States District Court for the Northern District of California, she joined the Prison Law Office as a staff attorney.
Learning to Read an Institution
At the Prison Law Office, Cervantez represented people challenging conditions inside California prisons. She later became a partner at Lieff Cabraser Heimann & Bernstein before joining Altshuler Berzon. The settings changed, but the work kept returning to the machinery of an institution: who controlled the relevant information, which rule governed the people inside the system, and whether an individual event disclosed a broader practice.
That approach connects matters that otherwise sit in different legal categories. A data-breach settlement can require years of identity protection and independent review. A pay-equity resolution can change how an employer assigns job levels and audits compensation. A disability-access decree can specify what employees must have at hand when a customer arrives. Cervantez’s docket crosses privacy, employment, consumer, and civil-rights law because each field can present the same practical question: what remedy reaches the process that produced the harm?
After Seventy-Nine Million Records
The consolidated Anthem data-breach litigation followed a 2015 cyberattack that plaintiffs alleged exposed personal information associated with roughly 79 million people. The federal court appointed Cervantez and three other lawyers as class counsel. In August 2018, the court granted final approval to a $115 million non-reversionary settlement resolving the class claims.
The settlement paired monetary and protective relief. It provided credit monitoring, identity-restoration services, reimbursement for qualifying out-of-pocket losses, and a cash alternative supported by a minimum allocation of $13 million. Anthem also agreed to specific cybersecurity measures, to triple its annual cybersecurity spending for three years, and to permit the plaintiffs’ expert to review annual compliance. Individual assistance addressed losses from the breach, while the security requirements addressed the continuing risk within the system holding the data.
When Job Titles Hide the Work
Pay systems can conceal unequal treatment behind titles that do not line up perfectly. At a conference on pay gaps, Cervantez put the comparison in plain terms: jobs may still demand substantially similar skill and responsibility even when their labels differ. In Ellis v. Google, women alleged that Google paid them less than men performing substantially similar work and steered women into lower-paid levels and tracks.
The court approved a $118 million settlement for more than 15,000 women. The settlement required an industrial-organizational psychologist to review leveling at hire, a labor economist to review annual pay-equity audits, and an external monitor to oversee implementation for three years. In Ries v. McDonald’s, a court certified a class of women who worked at a Mason, Michigan franchise operation in litigation alleging sexual harassment. The court later approved a $1.5 million settlement with the franchisee companies, with Cervantez named among class counsel. The two matters used different tools, but each moved from individual accounts to a workplace structure that could be examined across a group.
A Price, a Door, and the Rule Beneath Them
Candelore v. Tinder challenged subscription prices that plaintiffs alleged were higher for California users who were at least 30 years old, in violation of the Unruh Civil Rights Act and the state's unfair-competition law. After certifying a class in 2024, the court granted final settlement approval in June 2026. The final order approved a $60.5 million class-payment fund, appointed three firms including Altshuler Berzon as co-lead class counsel, and listed Cervantez among the lawyers representing the plaintiff and the class.
In a separate disability-access case, Cervantez helped negotiate an injunctive-only consent decree for deaf and hard-of-hearing customers at Nike stores in California while face-covering requirements were in effect. The decree required transparent masks, clean pens and paper, employee guidance, and entrance notices explaining available communication methods. Anthem demanded protection after a breach; Ellis added expert review to a pay system; Tinder funded payments tied to an age-pricing claim; Nike specified what had to change at the store door. The remedies differ because the institutional rule—and the way people encounter it—differs too.