Robert J. Nelson has been a partner at the law firm Lieff Cabraser Heimann & Bernstein for 30 years. Lieff Cabraser represents plaintiffs in large cases, typically class actions, against the nation’s biggest companies. For example, Robert played a major role in the firm’s tobacco cases on behalf of Attorneys General, which resulted in a settlement of $246 billion, the largest settlement in litigation history. More recently, he has taken on litigation on behalf of the California Attorney General against the nation’s oil companies, seeking to hold them liable for the harms caused to California relating to global warming.

Robert has also led some of the most innovative cases that the firm has pioneered, including a RICO action against State Farm, which settled literally on the courthouse steps, for $250 million. That case challenged State Farm’s funding the election campaign of an Illinois Supreme Court justice, and then lying about, all in bid to have that justice rule for State Farm and reverse a billion dollar verdict in a consumer action that was then pending against State Farm in the Illinois Supreme Court.  For his work on the State Farm case Robert was awarded Public Justice’s Trial Lawyer of the Year award.

In addition to winning that prestigious award, he has also twice received a California Lawyer of the Year (CLAY) award from California Lawyer magazine. In 2021, he was named a Legal Trialblazer in the field of environmental law by the National Law Journal. In 2020, he was named by the Daily Journal to be one of the top 100 lawyers in the State of California. He has been named a Northern California “Super Lawyer” every year since 2004, and is also on Lawdragon’s list of top 500 lawyers in the United States. Robert has also been nominated four times to be Consumer Attorney of the Year by the Consumer Attorneys of California.

Before joining Lieff Cabraser in 1994, Robert was an Assistant Federal Public Defender for the Northern District of California for five years, where he tried numerous cases. Prior to that and immediately following law school, Robert served as a judicial clerk for Judge Stephen Reinhardt of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. He is a 1987 graduate of NYU School of Law, where he had a Root Tilden Scholarship, served on the Law Review, and was a member of the Order of the Coif. He is a 1982 graduate of Cornell University.