Jallé H. Dafa
Partner, San Francisco Office
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415 956-1000
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Jalle Dafa

Jallé H. Dafa represents consumers and workers in high-stakes class action litigation.

A partner in Lieff Cabraser’s San Francisco office, Jallé has prosecuted several winning cases. She represented professors against Duke University and the University of North Carolina for conspiring to suppress the mobility and pay of their faculty. The litigation settled for a total of $73.5 million and significant injunctive relief.

Jallé has litigated against AT&T for charging hidden fees, Allstate for price discrimination in auto insurance premiums, Thermo Fisher Scientific and Natera for using a defective solution during the testing of irreplaceable human embryos, and Kaiser Permanente for racially discriminating against Black employees. She also successfully challenged the Trump Administration’s unlawful decision to withhold COVID-19 CARES Act stimulus relief from incarcerated Americans and their families. The district court granted summary judgment and entered a permanent injunction ordering the government to terminate its policy, resulting in $1.5 billion in economic impact payments to plaintiffs.

Jallé was involved in the firm’s work against Google for its collection and tracking of location information despite the disabling of a setting to prevent such tracking, resulting in a settlement of $62 million. Jallé also served as Class Counsel in a case against Oracle, one of the world’s largest data brokers, for surveilling the daily activities of Americans and complying their personal information into digital profiles—including detailed information regarding their everyday movements, finances, demographics, interests, and health concerns—and selling the personal profiles without consent to third parties for profit. The district court granted final approval of a settlement requiring Oracle to pay $115 million and make changes to its business practices.

Jallé currently represents scientists and scholars against six large commercial publishers of academic journals, including Elsevier, Springer Nature, Taylor and Francis, Sage, Wiley, and Wolters Kluwer, for appropriating billions of dollars that would have otherwise funded scientific research. The antitrust lawsuit alleges a three-part anticompetitive scheme: fixing the price of peer review services at zero, requiring scholars to submit their manuscripts to only one journal at a time, and prohibiting scholars from freely sharing their scientific findings.

Jallé is an active member of the Bay Area legal community. She serves as a Board Member of the ACLU Foundation of Northern California (ACLU NorCal), and a member of the Executive Committee of the Litigation Section of The Bar Association of San Francisco.

Jallé joined Lieff Cabraser after clerking on the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit for the Honorable Mary M. Schroeder, and the Northern District of California for the Honorable Jacqueline S. Corley. Prior to Lieff Cabraser, Jallé was an associate at Siegel, Yee, Brunner, & Mehta, where she litigated Title VII, Title IX, and Whistleblower retaliation claims on behalf of wrongfully terminated employees. Jallé earned an A.B. from Brown University, and a J.D. from Berkeley Law School.

  • University of California, Berkeley School of Law, Berkeley, CA
    J.D., 2011
    Co-Founder, Women of Color Collective; New clinic formation, Community Economic Justice Clinic; Housing & Eviction Defense Clinic, East Bay Community Law Center; Social Justice Chair, Law Students of African Descent; Baker & McKenzie Diversity Scholar, 2009
  • Brown University, Providence, RI
    B.A., 2007
    Co-President, The Organization of United African Peoples; Peer Counselor, Third World Center; Co-Founder, Coalition for Police Accountability and Institutional Transparency
  • California, 2013
  • U.S. Court Of Appeals, Ninth Circuit, 2019
  • U.S. District Court, Central District of California, 2020
  • U.S. District Court, Northern District of California, 2015
  • U.S. District Court, Southern District of California, 2019
  • American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California (Board of Directors, 2024)
  • Bar Association of San Francisco (Executive Committee, Litigation Section, 2024)
  • Moderator, “Effective Settlement Conferences,” BASF Litigation Section Panel, September 2024
  • Moderator, “Black History Month Roundtable,” ABA Section of Labor and Employment Law Heritage Month Webinar Series, February 2022
  • “Ones to Watch,” Best Lawyers, 2023-2025