Jonathan D. Selbin

Men were hired onto the sales floor, where the track led to management and sometimes to vice-president offices. Women were hired to run the registers, and the ceiling above a cashier was the customer service desk. The litigation ended with sweeping changes to how the company hired and promoted.

It was the kind of case Selbin was raised to recognize. He came to the law carrying a family legacy of fighting for equal rights, went to Harvard Law School, graduated magna cum laude in 1993, and spent two years clerking for Judge Marilyn Hall Patel in the Northern District of California before joining Lieff Cabraser in 1995. He has been there ever since — three decades, a seat on the firm's Executive Committee, and the chairmanship of its Economic Injury Product Defect Practice Group.

The Washing Machine That Went to Washington

The product at the center of Selbin's most famous fight was sitting in millions of American laundry rooms. Front-loading washing machines — Whirlpool, Kenmore, Maytag, Sears, LG — that trapped moisture, grew mold and bacteria inside their drums, and made freshly washed clothes smell like a wet tennis shoe. When customers complained, they were offered a special cleaning product to buy.

"It's the kind of case that everyone can relate to and understand," Selbin has said.

What most people could not see was how it was built. Before filing, Selbin hired engineers to test whether the machines were actually defectively designed. His chief witness was Gary Wilson, a twenty-seven-year Whirlpool veteran who had retired as the company's director of laundry technology. This was not a lawsuit chasing headlines; it was a lawsuit built on the manufacturer's own engineering knowledge.

The defense fought class certification all the way up. Selbin won in the Sixth Circuit in the Whirlpool multidistrict litigation, where he served as court-appointed lead counsel, and won again in the Seventh Circuit in Butler v. Sears, where Judge Richard Posner wrote the opinions sustaining certification. The Supreme Court vacated and sent Butler back; Posner reinstated it. Both defendants petitioned for certiorari. With Professor Samuel Issacharoff, Selbin was the primary author of the opposition papers in both cases.

The Supreme Court denied both petitions in 2014. The certification rulings he defended became foundational authority for consumer classes nationwide.

Largest to Smallest

The Checking Account Overdraft multidistrict litigation began with a quiet piece of arithmetic. Banks were posting each day's debit transactions not in the order they occurred but from the largest amount to the smallest. Process the big mortgage payment first, drain the balance, and the four small purchases that follow — the coffee, the gas, the groceries — each trigger a separate overdraft fee. Four fees where there might have been one, or none.

The coordinated federal proceedings swept in more than one hundred cases against thirty-five banks. Lieff Cabraser sat on the plaintiffs' executive committee and led the case against the largest defendant, Bank of America, with Selbin directing the aggregate discovery, the common briefing, the bank-specific negotiations, and the approval work.

He put the bank's written deposit agreements next to the order in which debits were actually processed, then next to the fees appearing on customer ledgers. Applied across millions of account entries, the posting rule itself became the common proof — of the class, of the damages, and of who was owed what. The record also incorporated customer disclosures, account-holder expectations, class definitions, and bank data for allocation and administration. The legal theories translated that record into questions of contract, good faith, and deception; the same transaction data identified the covered debits and calculated the resulting fees. In November 2011 the court approved a $410 million settlement, a fund that reached affected customers through court supervision and reshaped how the challenged practice was addressed going forward.

Thirty Million Phone Calls

Selbin then turned the same discipline on the telephone. He spearheaded a series of class actions under the Telephone Consumer Protection Act and developed the legal strategy behind the largest settlements in the statute's history — more than $200 million recovered by 2016, in litigation that transformed how the debt collection industry uses automated dialers.

Rose v. Bank of America was the anchor. The claims concerned automated and prerecorded calls to cell phones about credit-card and mortgage accounts, allegedly made without the prior express consent federal law requires. A lending relationship alone did not answer the consent question. Selbin's team traced each telephone number through the servicing files: where the number came from, what permission accompanied it, whether consent ever changed, and how the dialing system used that field. The work combined claimant interviews, account records, legal research, and formal discovery.

The finally approved settlement created a non-reversionary fund of $32,083,905 — every dollar committed to the class — with direct notice reaching more than 6.9 million people, and it required enhancements designed to stop automated cell-phone calls unless the servicing record showed prior express consent. Selbin helped carry the matter through final approval, including the request that put the class settlement before the court. The proof followed phone numbers; the relief followed the proof.

The Full Arc

Selbin's cases run the entire cycle, from the first expert retained before a complaint is filed to the last check cut by a claims administrator. As court-appointed co-lead counsel in the Imprelis herbicide litigation, he helped deliver a nationwide property-damage settlement of nearly $575 million. He served as lead counsel in the Navistar MaxxForce engine litigation, co-lead in the Capital One TCPA multidistrict litigation, and co-lead in the Mercedes-Benz Tele Aid litigation, and he currently serves as court-appointed interim co-lead counsel in the Commonwealth Edison rate-inflation class action on behalf of millions of Illinois electricity customers.

Together, the cases in which he has played a lead role have produced court-approved settlements recovering more than $3 billion in cash for class members, plus extended and enhanced warranties and other relief that never shows up in the headline number.

Three Decades and Six Circuits

Selbin is a partner in Lieff Cabraser's New York office. He has argued appeals in six federal circuits, winning favorable opinions in the Fifth, Sixth, Seventh, Ninth, and Eleventh, and he is admitted before the United States Supreme Court and licensed in California, the District of Columbia, and New York. The American Association for Justice gave him its Board of Governors' Distinguished Service Award in 2016. Since March 2025, he has also served as a special assistant attorney general to Michigan's attorney general on federal constitutional and administrative questions.

The equal-rights legacy runs forward as well as back. Selbin served on the board of Equal Justice Works and sits on its inaugural Board of Counselors, and in 2017 he and his family founded the Selbin Voting Rights Fellowship, which funds a rolling two-year fellow working to ensure fair access to the ballot.

He earned his undergraduate degree from the University of Michigan in 1989 and his law degree from Harvard in 1993. The playing field he described leveling is the one he has spent thirty years walking onto, on the side that starts with none of the advantages.