Felicia M. Medina

After earning her J.D. from Yale Law School in 2006, Medina began at Morrison & Foerster before crossing to the plaintiffs' side, where she rose from associate to managing partner, opening and leading the San Francisco office of a national plaintiffs' firm. In 2017 she co-founded Medina Orthwein LLP, a civil-rights and public-interest firm in Oakland, and since 2024 she has practiced as a partner at Valerian Law in Berkeley, where her docket spans employment discrimination, equal pay, sexual harassment, wage-and-hour claims, wrongful termination, and retaliation.

Verdict Into Remedy

The case that shaped her early plaintiff-side career was Velez v. Novartis Pharmaceuticals Corp., a nationwide challenge to gender discrimination in pay, promotion, and the treatment of pregnancy and caregiving across a pharmaceutical sales force. Medina worked on the plaintiffs' team in litigation that culminated, after a seven-week trial in 2010, in a $250 million punitive-damages verdict. What happened next mattered as much as the verdict. The parties reached a $175 million class settlement covering more than 6,000 current and former female sales employees, and Judge Colleen McMahon, approving it, called the result excellent after years of risky and expensive litigation.

A verdict establishes liability and transforms bargaining power; a class settlement distributes relief, defines who qualifies, and builds the administrative machinery to reach workers whose individual claims would otherwise be too costly to pursue. Velez moved through both stages — a public jury decision converted into a court-supervised structure that delivered relief across an entire national workforce rather than leaving thousands of women to litigate the verdict's consequences one at a time. It became the template for the kind of case Medina would keep building: common practices, common proof, and a remedy operating at the same scale as the harm.

Money Plus Mechanism

The settlements that followed pair payment with structural terms. In the Qualcomm gender-discrimination matter, Medina led her firm's San Francisco office while representing women in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics roles who alleged systemic disparities in pay and promotion. The case resolved for a $19.5 million non-reversionary fund accompanied by workplace changes aimed at the mechanisms that decide whether equal-pay commitments become measurable practice — transparency, evaluation, promotion systems, and protection against retaliation. Her public explanation of the result was characteristically direct: abstract commitments to equality are insufficient without concrete systems that show employees how decisions are made and protect them when they challenge those decisions.

In Wellens v. Daiichi Sankyo, a gender-discrimination class action for female pharmaceutical sales employees, the federal court granted final approval to an $8.2 million settlement in 2016, after the plaintiffs won Equal Pay Act conditional certification in the Ninth Circuit. The agreement paired money with management training, changes to pay practices affecting employees who took medical leave, and review of employment policies. And in two race-discrimination matters involving Kaiser Permanente, which Medina co-led to an $18.9 million combined resolution, the same architecture appears: one $11.5 million class settlement covered approximately 2,225 African American employees in administrative-support and consulting job families, and final approval in 2022 placed monetary relief for qualifying class members alongside workplace programs addressing fairness in pay and advancement. In every one of these cases, the negotiated relief tracks the alleged mechanism. Where the claim is that pay-setting was opaque, the remedy makes it visible; where the claim is that promotion ran on unexamined discretion, the remedy builds review.

Who Decides the Gateway

Medina's most consequential appellate work concerned the gateway itself. She represented Timothy Sandquist, an employee pressing race-discrimination claims, in a California case testing what happens when an employer's mandatory arbitration agreement collides with class allegations. The trial court compelled individual arbitration and dismissed the class claims outright. The California Court of Appeal reversed the dismissal, and in 2016 the California Supreme Court affirmed, holding in Sandquist v. Lebo Automotive that under the agreements at issue it was the arbitrator, not the court, who had authority to decide whether classwide arbitration was available.

The ruling had practical consequences. If a court could resolve the class-arbitration question at the threshold and dismiss the collective claims, the case could end before the arbitrator ever read the agreement. Sending the question to the arbitrator preserved a procedural path for workers whose individual claims might otherwise be too small, or too exposed, to pursue. In Sandquist, Medina argued her theory that the forum decides the fight to the state's highest court and won. Her appellate range extends back to Barrett v. Whirlpool in the Sixth Circuit, another discrimination appeal successfully argued years before.

Medina's service runs through the institutions of the public-interest bar: board roles with Public Justice and the Chicana Latina Foundation, past board service with Legal Aid at Work, and past co-chairmanship of the National Center for Lesbian Rights.

What holds the docket together is the conviction that discrimination is a system before it is an incident, and that accountability means reaching the system. The forum, the decision-maker, the availability of collective proof, and the structure of relief determine whether recurring discrimination stays scattered into private disputes or comes into view as a common practice. Medina fights through those gateways for a reason that never changes: so that the workers' own stories — the pregnancy penalized, the raise withheld, the complaint that ended a career — remain at the center of the case, heard together, in a forum with the power to answer them.