Pocket Résumé
James C. Sturdevant ’72: Founder, The Sturdevant Law Firm, San Rafael, California. Recognition: San Francisco Trial Lawyers Association Lifetime Achievement Award, 2025; California Lawyer of the Year 2019, among many awards. Winning Advocate: Noted for his appellate advocacy, at BC Law he won the Grimes Moot Court Competition. Exacting Pursuits: His favorite pastimes, fly fishing and practicing jazz/classical piano, require intense concentration: “It’s important that you’re focused, intent on what you’re doing.”
In May 2025, James (“Jim”) Sturdevant received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the San Francisco Trial Lawyers’ Association. The award recognized 50 years of legal practice distinguished by a stellar record of class actions involving consumer protection, financial and insurance fraud, employment discrimination, and unlawful, unfair, and fraudulent business practices.
Speaking from his offices in California, he reflected on why he embarked on a career of filing class actions on behalf of predominantly low-income consumers and workers. As a law student and as a young attorney, he worked for legal services organizations in Baltimore,
Connecticut, and California, representing vulnerable clients, including people who were incarcerated, confined in mental institutions, and dependent on state and federal welfare programs.
While representing these clients, whether in landlord/tenant disputes, divorce, or consumer matters, Sturdevant realized that while he might be able to help a particular plaintiff, he could not effect systemic change that would benefit a larger group of people. “I came to believe that class action litigation, permanent injunctive relief on behalf of a statewide class of people, would change practices on a larger scale if I were successful,” he said.
Through myriad multi-million-dollar class action cases over the following decades, Sturdevant harnessed the power of such litigation to promote the public good. His marathon battle against payday lender CashCall exemplifies the longevity, complexity, and high stakes common to many of his cases, and their potential legislative impact.
In 2008, Eduardo De La Torre was a cash-strapped teenage college student in San Mateo. After exhausting other options, he applied for a $2,600 CashCall loan, not realizing he would be charged interest at 96 percent for three and a half years. Sturdevant and his team filed a lawsuit on behalf of De La Torre and around 135,000 CashCall California sub-prime borrowers trapped by exorbitant conditions and harassed by the company’s aggressive debt-collection methods.
In August 2018, the California Supreme Court decided unanimously that a high interest rate alone could render a loan “unconscionable,” a landmark ruling that won Sturdevant and his team the 2019 California Lawyer of the Year Award. Following that decision, the California State Legislature reimposed mandatory interest rate caps on loans between $2,500 and $10,000, which Sturdevant noted as “a very important salutary effect of the case.” In 2021, a trial judge awarded the borrowers more than $245 million in unconscionable interest paid.
A longtime supporter of legal assistance organizations, Sturdevant is a founding member of the Washington, DC-based National Association of Consumer Advocates. He chaired the organization’s Amicus Curiae Committee for 20 years, and has authored over 100 amicus briefs on financial services practices, arbitration, and other consumer issues. Beginning in the 1980s, he utilized the cy pres (“next best use”) doctrine in California to channel unclaimed funds from class action settlements into efforts to educate and protect the public from the practices challenged in those lawsuits.
Now contemplating retirement, Sturdevant reflected that his favorite aspect of practice has been strategizing in relation to novel legal questions, always with a view to achieving “a lasting impact beyond the parties in the case.”
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