Eric F. McBurney

Overview

Eric McBurney has tried more than 100 cases to verdict. He defends California employers in wage-and-hour, discrimination, harassment, retaliation, and wrongful termination matters, and he evaluates each one the way a jury eventually will. That perspective shapes his advice at the point it matters most, when a client is still deciding whether a case should be resolved or defended. Clients come to him for a candid read on exposure, disciplined discovery, and preparation organized around the questions a jury will actually be asked to answer.

Before entering private practice, Eric spent more than a decade as a public defender in Contra Costa, San Bernardino, and San Francisco counties. He tried more than 50 jury trials in Contra Costa alone and carried felony caseloads through arraignment, motions, trial, and post-conviction proceedings. He later represented clients facing the death penalty as senior staff attorney with the ACLU Capital Punishment Project. That volume of courtroom work built a defense instinct he now applies to employment matters: take apart the other side’s narrative, hold them to their burden, and never accept a claim at the value it was pled.

Having also represented employees in wage-and-hour, PAGA, FEHA, and retaliation cases, he knows how plaintiffs’ counsel build, value, and apply pressure to these claims, and where a theory tends to be thinner than the complaint suggests. Employers use that read to separate the matters that warrant early resolution from the ones worth defending through trial.

Outside the courtroom, Eric counsels employers on policies, workplace investigations, and personnel decisions, with attention to the record each decision creates. He holds a master’s degree in English literature and writes his own briefs, working from the view that a clearly written motion serves a client better than a long one.

Publications

• Author, “So Long as Lawmakers Do Not Use the N-Word: The Maximum Family Grant Example for How the Equal Protection Clause Protects Racially Discriminatory Laws,” Journal of Gender, Race & Justice, 2011