Lawrance A. Bohm

The Accusation That Outlives the Job

When an employer fires a worker and brands him a thief, the lost paycheck is the least of the damage. Retaliation can break a career, rewrite a professional reputation, and leave the worker carrying the company's accusation long after the termination date. Lawrance A. Bohm has built one of California's most formidable employment trial practices around that insight. His cases turn on the employer's stated reason — the investigation, the policy citation, the documented explanation assembled before the worker ever reaches a lawyer — and on the sequence of events that shows whether the explanation can survive scrutiny in front of twelve jurors. Again and again, it cannot.

The pattern of his trials is a revealing chronology: a protected act, a change in treatment, an official justification, and the evidence that tests whether the justification holds. Employers arrive in court with the story already written. Bohm rebuilds the record from timing, comparative treatment, communications, and the testimony of the people who watched it happen, until an individual worker can answer a corporate accusation with something no employer can draft in advance — a public record tested before a jury.

Eighty Million Dollars and a Calendar

The method's most recent demonstration came in April 2024, when a Sacramento jury returned a verdict of $80,252,385 for three former Zurich claims examiners in Brantley v. Zurich. Melinda Brantley, Nicholas Lardie, and Daniel Koos were longtime employees at the insurer's Rancho Cordova office, terminated in late 2017 after using extra paid days off that their own manager had distributed, with supervisory approval, as an informal reward for deserving employees. When the company later investigated the practice, it recast those days as stolen time and dismissed the workers under an accusation of theft. The trial Bohm and his team presented put the workers' honesty and professional identity at the center of the damages inquiry, and the jury's answer was emphatic: awards for economic harm, emotional harm, and damage to reputation, capped by roughly twenty-five million dollars in punitive damages for each of the three. The verdict ranks among the largest employment awards in California history — and it grew directly from Bohm's signature move, holding an employer's official explanation up against the record of what its own managers had authorized.

It was not his first time at that altitude. In Juarez v. AutoZone, tried in federal court in San Diego in 2014, Bohm represented Rosario Juarez, a store manager who alleged she was demoted after becoming pregnant and then fired after she challenged the company's treatment of women. The jury returned a verdict of $185.9 million, its punitive component the largest then recorded in a single-plaintiff employment case. The trial itself made a national statement about what pregnancy discrimination and retaliation could cost — and about what a single store manager, properly represented, could require a national retailer to answer for.

The Whistleblower's Chronology

Bohm's docket returns constantly to workers punished for saying something true. In Armstrong v. Life Care Centers of America, tried in 2023, he secured an $11.182 million verdict for a care-facility employee who reported substandard patient care and then faced termination and defamation — a case in which the employer's accusation compounded the retaliation, and the jury was asked to value both the career and the name that had been damaged. In Webb v. Ramos Oil, he obtained a $6.241 million wrongful-termination verdict for a tanker-truck driver who refused a dangerous return-to-work demand. His remark about workplace chemicals concerned John Barrie's separate case against Caltrans, which involved disability discrimination and harassment.

The AutoZone litigation that preceded Juarez shows the same commitments at a smaller scale. In Kell v. AutoZone, tried in 2010, Bohm won a $1.369 million verdict for a manager who reported harassment and discrimination and was retaliated against for it. In a companion-era case, Cosby v. AutoZone, a jury awarded $1.5 million over the company's failure to accommodate a disability. The dollar figures vary by an order of magnitude across these trials, but the architecture never changes: a protected act — a safety report, a discrimination complaint, a pregnancy, a request for accommodation — followed by an adverse decision dressed in neutral language, followed by a trial that strips the dressing off.

Trained on the Other Side

Part of what makes Bohm dangerous to employers is that he learned their playbook from the inside. After earning his B.S. in crime, law and society from the University of California, Irvine in 1995, he took his J.D. cum laude from Tulane University Law School in 2000, where he served as law school class president and externed for United States District Judge Ivan L.R. Lemelle in New Orleans. He began his career at the Sacramento defense firm Porter Scott, then moved in 2003 to Jackson Lewis, the national employment-defense firm, litigating Fair Employment and Housing Act and Title VII claims from the employer's side of the table. In 2005 he crossed over for good, founding Bohm Law Group and devoting the practice entirely to workers — managers, executives, nurses, drivers, and laborers confronting wrongful termination, harassment, discrimination, retaliation, and wage theft. Two years reading employers' investigations taught him precisely where their explanations are built to bend.

He gives the craft back as well: he teaches trial skills through Tulane's law boot camp, serves on the executive committee of the Sacramento County Bar's Labor and Employment Section, lectures regularly at legal conferences, and explains workers' rights to the broader public as a frequent broadcast commentator, including a weekly radio segment on employment law.

The through-line, from the first AutoZone trial to the Zurich verdict, is a conviction about who controls the story. An employer's power does not end at the termination meeting; it extends into the file, the reference call, the industry's memory. Bohm's trials exist to break that monopoly. In his courtrooms, the fired worker branded a thief, the nurse who reported what she saw, the driver who refused an unsafe order, and the manager who objected to discrimination each get the one thing the company's paperwork can never anticipate — a jury, listening to the whole chronology, deciding for itself whose explanation holds.