B. Robert Allard

The Complaint Marked Confidential

In 2009, USA Swimming's executive director declared under penalty of perjury that he had never previously received a complaint or claim against coach Andy King.

Email exchanges surfaced in litigation showed otherwise. A sexual abuse complaint against King had reached him, and he had ordered it kept confidential. At least one other complaint arrived around the same time.

Andy King spent roughly thirty years around young swimmers. B. Robert Allard's clients allege he manipulated and sexually assaulted more than a dozen female athletes in that span.

Allard began filing against USA Swimming in 2010 — against the national governing body responsible for selecting and training America's Olympic swimmers, on the theory that it had known about reported sexual misconduct by member coaches and had not acted. He was opposed by lawyers from eight different firms.

The litigation drew an ABC 20/20 broadcast and wider coverage. In the years that followed, child-protection programs were strengthened in swimming and across the Olympic Movement. Consumer Attorneys of California honored him for the work. Swimming World named him one of the ten most influential figures in the sport in 2014; SwimSwam had named him its Person of the Year in 2012.

"Our cases do not end with just a monetary payout," Allard has said. The aim, through the claims, is to raise awareness, enact legislation, and force policy change.

The Cost of a Background Check

A youth soccer coach moved through affiliated teams without anyone running a criminal-background check on him, and then sexually abused a minor player.

The trial court dismissed the negligent-screening claim before any discovery — the child's lawyers never got to ask what the organizations knew or how the system worked. Allard took it up on appeal, and in 2017 the California Court of Appeal reversed.

The associations governed the leagues, registered the participants, and set the requirements for adults who work with children. That gave them a relationship with those children and made the risk foreseeable. Against that, the court weighed the cost of a background check: trivial, and distributable across registration fees.

The court also rejected the defendants' argument that screening is pointless because no check catches every dangerous adult. A precaution does not have to be perfect. It only has to exclude the adults whose records already show they should not be near children.

After remand the case settled for $8.2 million: $6.5 million from the United States Youth Soccer Association and $1.7 million from the California Youth Soccer Association. The national organization began requiring criminal-background checks for covered coaches, placing the screen before an adult ever reaches a child.

Four Children Spared a Return to the Stand

A former elementary-school teacher was convicted of molesting his students. Four families brought civil claims against the Evergreen School District.

The children had already testified once, in the criminal trial. Allard built the civil case so they would not have to do it again. The conviction had established the conduct; the civil case then asked what officials knew, what warnings had come in before, how the children were supervised, and how the district responded when it was told. All of it could be proved from the criminal record and the school's own files.

The district paid $15 million to resolve the four families' claims, and no child took the stand a second time.

Kylie McKenzie

Kylie McKenzie was a rising professional tennis player training under a coach employed by the United States Tennis Association. In March 2022 she sued, alleging that the coach sexually assaulted her and that the USTA had employed and failed to supervise him despite what was already known about him. The assault cost her performances on the court, and brought anxiety, panic attacks and depression.

A federal judge granted partial summary judgment in her favor on the supervision question, and the case went to a jury in Florida in 2024. Allard was trial counsel.

The jury awarded $3 million in compensatory damages and $6 million in punitive damages — $9 million in all. The two figures answer different questions: the first measures what was done to her, the second applies the separate and higher standard for punishment and deterrence.

The USTA appealed to the Eleventh Circuit. Allard's team defended the trial record and the verdict at oral argument on January 27, 2026.

Practice

Allard is a partner at Cerri, Boskovich & Allard in San Jose, and his practice is devoted to survivors of childhood sexual abuse and to the organizations responsible for their safety. His firm keeps a team of lawyers and experts working full-time on these cases, and he has litigated against school districts across Northern California — some fourteen of them, from San Francisco and San Mateo down through the South Bay to Los Banos.

He has worked with state legislators to strengthen mandatory reporting laws aimed at people who abuse children. He took his undergraduate degree at the University of Notre Dame and his law degree at the University of San Francisco School of Law, and was admitted in California in 1995.

He has four children of his own.