Relman, Dane & Colfax is pleased to announce that Jia Cobb has joined the partnership. Since coming to the Firm in 2012, Jia has used her keen litigation insights and courtroom skills to secure favorable verdicts or settlements in cases involving employment discrimination, police misconduct and familial status discrimination. As a new partner, she will continue to concentrate on these areas as she helps to design the Firm's new and ongoing litigation.
Jia has excelled in hotly-litigated employment matters, helping to secure substantial verdicts in two jury trials in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. One involved an African American woman initially hired as a bartender in a popular new restaurant, and subsequently fired because the owner stated a preference for "hot white chicks." After a three-week trial, the jury found liability, and returned verdicts for $ 170,000 in compensatory damages and $ 512,000 in punitive damages. In the other, Jia tried a retaliation case on behalf of five African American officers of the D.C. Metropolitan Police Department, which resulted in a favorable jury verdict and subsequent settlement.
Jia has also achieved remarkable success in combating housing discrimination against families with children. In her tenure at the Firm she has litigated seven family status discrimination cases to successful resolutions. She has also played a critical role in advancing the Firm's police accountability practice, including recently successfully litigating a case against the District of Columbia for the failure of its police department to provide insulin medication to a person in custody, resulting in serious illness.
Currently pending on her docket are important cases involving the liability of a private prison transport company for mistreatment of persons taken into custody and racial profiling of an African American law enforcement officer.
Jia is a graduate, cum laude, from Harvard Law School. She was a summer clerk at the Firm in 2004, and after graduation clerked for the Hon. Diane P. Wood, of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit. Prior to coming to the Firm, she spent six years at D.C.'s Public Defender Service handling complex criminal trials involving serious criminal offenses, including homicide.
Please join us in welcoming Jia to the partnership.