Advocacy Center for Employment Law

Focus and practice areas

This San Jose, California firm works within a single field of law, labor and employment. Its docket covers workplace discrimination and harassment, sexual harassment claims, wage and hour disputes, wrongful termination, and whistleblower and retaliation matters. The firm also handles rights of privacy claims and severance negotiations for people leaving a job.

The firm works the business end of employment law as well. It takes on trade secrets questions under the Uniform Trade Secrets Act, non-competition issues, and unfair business practices. Discipline avoidance appears on the stated list too, an area that deals with workplace conduct before it hardens into a formal claim.

What the categories cover

Read plainly, the list touches most of the points where work and law meet. Discrimination and harassment claims concern how a person is treated on the job. Wage and hour claims turn on pay that a worker says is owed. Wrongful termination and retaliation claims focus on the end of a job and the reasons behind it. Severance negotiation comes a step earlier, at the point where an exit is still being settled.

In my opinion, that range is wide for a small office. It reads as a practice that can follow an employment problem across several forms, whether a harassment complaint or a dispute over a departing worker's knowledge of company secrets. The common thread is the workplace, and the firm keeps its attention there.

How the firm began

Steven Paul Cohn founded the firm in 1994 and is its senior litigation counsel. He has practiced law in the Silicon Valley area since 1980, so the office carries more than four decades of his work behind it. Cohn has handled claims through negotiation, arbitration, mediation, and trial, which covers most of the paths an employment matter can travel.

His experience reaches past private practice. Cohn has taught as a law professor at Santa Clara University, sat as a Judge Pro Tem in the Santa Clara County Superior Court, and worked as an arbitrator. In 1992 he received a California State Bar award for his pro bono legal services.

Time on the bench and time as an arbitrator both put a lawyer in the seat that decides a case. That vantage point can sharpen how a litigator frames an argument, since it shows how a claim reads to the person weighing it. A founder with that history brings a settled sense of how employment disputes tend to resolve, whether at the table or in a courtroom.

Who else practices here

Sean Michael Rankin Bothamley is the second attorney the firm names. He is an employment lawyer based in San Jose, and his work centers on labor and employment matters, the same ground the firm was built on. He completed his undergraduate studies at Loyola Marymount University and earned his law degree from Santa Clara University School of Law. That schooling keeps his training within the same California system where the firm does its work.

Both lawyers have a tie to Santa Clara University. Cohn taught there, and Bothamley earned his degree there. That shared connection gives the two-person team a common grounding in the same regional legal community, one Cohn has worked in since the start of his career. A smaller firm also tends to mean a client works with a named attorney rather than a large team.

Courts, agencies, and both sides of a case

The firm represents both individuals and management. Its cases run in state and federal courts and before administrative agencies. Those agencies include the California Labor Commission, the U.S. Department of Labor, and the Unemployment Insurance Appeals Board, which handles disputes over jobless benefits.

Because the firm appears before agencies as well as courts, its cases can start outside a courtroom. A wage complaint can go to the California Labor Commission, and a benefits dispute can reach the Unemployment Insurance Appeals Board. Those forums move on their own rules and timelines, and a firm that knows them can steer a matter to the right one early.

Handling both sides is less common in employment law, where many offices take only workers or only employers. As a reviewer, I find that choice worth weighing. A lawyer who has argued from the employer's seat and the worker's seat tends to anticipate the other side's next move, and that can shape how a claim is built and how far it travels before a resolution.

What the record adds up to

The office is in San Jose, inside the Silicon Valley labor market where Cohn has practiced since 1980. That base sits in a region with a dense concentration of employers, which tends to produce a steady flow of workplace disputes. The firm also states that it serves clients in Paseo Robles, so its work reaches beyond the immediate Bay Area.

The listing describes a practice built around one senior litigator with a long local record, supported by a second employment lawyer trained at Santa Clara University. Its subjects stretch across the employment field, and they cover harassment and wage disputes as well as trade secrets and severance. The firm has kept its work inside labor and employment law since 1994.