Genie Harrison
Employee-Rights Trial Lawyer · Harassment & Discrimination · Founder
“Sexual harassment is an abuse of power.
The Marks That Outlast the Job
Genie Harrison builds employment cases by turning workplace records, pay data, trauma evidence, and an employer's response to complaints into proof a jury can test.
The Marks That Outlast the Job
Power misused at work leaves marks that outlast any job, and Genie Harrison has built a practice around proving them. Her clients are employees and survivors — firefighters, transit workers, janitors, studio assistants, video-game developers — people whose working lives were bent by harassment, discrimination, or retaliation, and who then discovered that the hardest part was being believed. Harrison's answer is trial work built around preparation: a deliberately low-volume docket run from downtown Los Angeles by a small, predominantly female team, in which each attorney carries only a handful of cases at a time so that every one of them can be built as if a jury will hear it. That method has produced more than $240 million in verdicts and settlements, including a $100 million class resolution, a race-discrimination verdict of just over $38 million, and a string of seven- and eight-figure recoveries for individual workers whose names never made headlines.
Harrison came to the work by a route that gave her both distance and intimacy with her subject. She entered law school imagining she would prosecute war criminals at The Hague; instead she encountered, firsthand, the ordinary abuses of power that professors and attorneys could inflict on a young woman inside her own profession. After a judicial clerkship and early years in business and plaintiff-side litigation at Southern California firms, she opened her own shop in 2013 to practice to her own standard. What she carried forward from those first ambitions was a prosecutor's instinct for accountability — the conviction that misconduct is not a misunderstanding to be smoothed over but conduct to be named, proven, and answered.
Riot Games and the Price of a Culture
The case that showed the full reach of her method involved Riot Games, the Los Angeles studio behind League of Legends. Women at the company had alleged systemic gender discrimination and a culture of harassment, and a proposed class settlement of $10 million was already on the table when Harrison entered the litigation. She concluded the number did not answer the scale of the claims — California's civil-rights agencies suggested the exposure might be many times larger — and she refused it. Her team brought in statisticians to analyze the company's own pay data, rebuilt the damages case from the ground up, and pressed on. The litigation resolved in 2021 for $100 million, one of the largest settlements ever reached in a gender-discrimination and equal-pay class action, covering current and former women employees and contractors and coupled with workplace reforms carried out under outside oversight. The settlement paired compensation for the people already harmed with workplace changes carried out under outside oversight.
Harrison's docket on behalf of survivors runs from the anonymous to the infamous. She represented Sandeep Rehal, Harvey Weinstein's former personal assistant, whose account of daily degradation helped the public understand that the producer's abuses extended beyond the casting couch to the ordinary machinery of his office; Harrison was part of the team that ultimately recovered $17 million for survivors through the wreckage of the Weinstein Company's bankruptcy. For a Black lesbian firefighter who faced discrimination and retaliation inside the Los Angeles Fire Department, she won a $6.8 million judgment. Her firm's trial record also includes a $22.5 million Fair Housing Act discrimination verdict, a $6.2 million verdict for gender discrimination, harassment, wrongful termination, and retaliation, and a settlement of nearly $4.4 million in an equal-pay and retaliation case. Each case asked a factfinder to look past the overt events to what the employer did after the complaint — whether it investigated, whether it protected the person who reported, and whether it lived by the policies it invoked.
Keeping the Client Whole
Harrison's advocacy begins with the client's dignity. Harassment and discrimination trials can be steered into judgments about an employee's personality, memory, or response to trauma, and defendants often count on exactly that drift. "We don't go through life learning how to respond to traumatic events like rape in ways that make sense to society," she has said, and much of her courtroom craft is devoted to closing the gap between how trauma actually behaves and how jurors expect it to look. She pulls every case back to power, conduct, notice, and accountability so that the client remains a whole person whose working life is never reduced to the worst thing that happened inside it.
That concern for how damage is understood led her to develop two client-reporting tools. Her Damages Genie application, launched in 2019, walks plaintiffs through documenting the emotional-distress dimensions of their cases — the sleepless nights, the ruptured relationships, the daily tax of fear — so that harm which usually surfaces only in fragments on the witness stand arrives in court as a full record. A companion tool helps victims log incidents as they happen. Both begin with a trial lawyer's practical premise: the injury in these cases is real, it is provable, and the profession owed its clients a better way of proving it.
Teaching Trial Lawyers
Harrison has also spent years teaching and organizing within the plaintiffs' bar. In 2021 she served as president of the Consumer Attorneys Association of Los Angeles — only the fifth woman to lead the organization in its long history — after more than a decade on its Board of Governors and years chairing its education programs and annual convention, where she has trained a generation of plaintiffs' lawyers in trial skills. In 2022 alone, Consumer Attorneys of California named her its Consumer Attorney of the Year and the California Employment Lawyers Association gave her its Joe Posner Award for advancing employee rights. She writes a monthly column for Ms. Magazine on equal rights and the workplace, serves on the board of the California Women's Law Center, and is a fellow of the College of Labor and Employment Lawyers.
Across individual cases and class litigation, Harrison treats abuse of power as a question of proof, not perception. Employers hold the personnel files, the pay data, the investigation reports; employees hold their own accounts and whatever courage remains after reporting. A case can reverse that imbalance by reconstructing a workplace's culture from its records, putting it before twelve people, and making the marks that power leaves on working lives legible.