The Nourmand Law Firm, APC

Focus and practice areas

Employment law is the entire focus of this firm. It represents employees in disputes with their employers, and the work covers a defined set of claims. Michael Nourmand and James A. De Sario handle discrimination, sexual harassment, wrongful termination, and retaliation, along with wage and hour matters, class actions, and workplace defamation.

Discrimination and harassment claims deal with how a worker was treated because of a protected trait or because of unwelcome conduct on the job. Wrongful termination covers firings that break the law or a contract. Retaliation claims come up when a worker faces punishment for reporting a problem or taking a protected step, such as filing a complaint or joining an investigation.

Wage and hour matters cover unpaid overtime, missed meal and rest breaks, and disputes over how a job was classified. The firm also brings employment class actions, which gather many workers with the same complaint into one case. Workplace defamation, the last of the named areas, deals with false statements that damage a worker's standing. As a reviewer, I read this range as a practice built entirely around the employee side of California labor law.

How the team is built

The firm names two attorneys, Michael Nourmand and James A. De Sario, both listed with the Esq. designation. Their names anchor the legal work across every practice area the firm describes.

Three support staff back that work. Alejandra Beltran, Lizbeth Ramirez, and Yarelyn Marroquin work as paralegals and legal assistants on the firm's cases. Paralegals in this kind of litigation gather documents, keep case files in order, and prepare filings for the attorneys to review. A two-attorney firm with three named support staff points to a team that handles its matters directly, with the same people on a file through the case.

How these cases generally proceed

Employment claims in California tend to follow a few common paths, and knowing them helps set expectations. Discrimination, harassment, and retaliation claims often begin with an administrative complaint to a state agency, which can issue a right-to-sue notice before a lawsuit goes forward. That first step sets a clock, since these claims carry filing deadlines that can bar a late case.

Wage and hour disputes turn on records. Time sheets, pay stubs, and the duties a person actually performed all feed into whether that worker was paid and classified correctly. Class actions add a further stage: a court must certify the class before a case moves ahead for the whole group, and that ruling shapes how the matter resolves. Individual class members often play a limited role, since the named plaintiffs and the attorneys carry the case for the whole group.

Most of these cases settle before trial, often after mediation or a settlement conference where both sides weigh the evidence and the cost of going forward. Defamation claims tied to the workplace, such as false statements made during or after a firing, follow the ordinary rules of proof for harm to a person's reputation. Each of the firm's named areas moves through some version of this procedure.

What to expect as a client

Bringing an employment claim starts with a conversation about what happened and what records exist. A worker usually arrives with pay documents, emails, a personnel file, or notes about dates and conversations. The firm's intake, like most in this field, turns those pieces into a picture of whether a legal claim fits the facts.

From there the case builds through written demands, filings, and the exchange of evidence with the other side. Employment matters can take months or longer, since court schedules and discovery set much of the pace. For a Spanish-speaking client, having the firm handle the case in Spanish removes one hurdle from an already demanding process.

Where the firm works

The firm runs two offices. Its main office is in Beverly Hills, within Los Angeles County, and it keeps a second office in Pasadena. The two locations put the firm within reach of clients on the west side of Los Angeles and in the San Gabriel Valley. From those two bases it takes cases across the state.

The site lists reach into Los Angeles, San Bernardino, and Riverside Counties, along with the Orange, San Diego, Sacramento, San Francisco, and Oakland areas. That spread covers much of California's working population, north and south. The firm provides services in Spanish, which matters in a state where a large share of workers speak Spanish at home. It offers consultations to people who are weighing a claim.

What two decades of practice covers

The firm states more than 20 years of experience in employment law. The site names no founding year, so the precise start stays unstated. A firm that has worked this long has seen California employment law shift more than once. The state has raised its harassment training standards over that time, and it has changed how wage claims and class actions move through the courts. Long tenure in one field also tends to mean regular appearances before the same courts and agencies, which can smooth the practical side of a case.

In my opinion, the steadiness of a single-focus firm carries weight for a client trying to judge fit. The attorneys work the same body of law week after week, and the support staff handle the same kinds of files. Michael Nourmand and James A. De Sario carry that work from the firm's Beverly Hills and Pasadena offices.