Who We Are
Bob Arns grew up in Portland, Oregon in a family with limited means — his father never completed high school, his mother's education ended there too. He started working a paper route and lawn jobs as a kid, became a bag boy at Albertson's at 14, and by 16 had made journeyman in the union as both a checker and produce worker. During his junior year of high school, he was managing night stock operations twice a week — working alongside older hands who taught him things no classroom could. He graduated with highest honors from UC Santa Barbara and finished in the top 5% of his class at USF School of Law on a full scholarship, where he was managing editor of the law review and moot court champion.
He could have gone anywhere. He chose to represent plaintiffs — the people on the wrong end of a corporate balance sheet — because he'd been one of them. He founded the firm more than 40 years ago in San Francisco on a premise that still drives everything we do: ordinary people deserve the same caliber of legal representation as the insurance companies and corporations opposing them. From the start, the practice focused on injured workers in the trades — both workers' compensation and third-party civil claims against the contractors, property owners, and equipment manufacturers responsible for unsafe jobsites.
Jonathan Davis came to the law from a different direction. Before he ever set foot in a courtroom, he served as an International Representative and National Field Director for the Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers' Union, representing workers in arbitrations across the West and organizing on picket lines. When he joined the firm, he brought something you can't teach in law school — an instinct for how working people actually experience the legal system, and a trial approach shaped by years of labor campaigns. He now leads the firm as Managing Partner, overseeing case strategy, mentoring younger attorneys, and maintaining the relationships with labor organizations that have been central to the practice since the beginning.
The firm's other practice areas didn't come from a business plan — they grew from the work itself. When you represent injured workers and their families long enough, you start to see the full scope of what they're up against. The same employer shorting a worker on overtime is doing it to dozens of others. The product that injured someone on a jobsite turns out to be defective across the country. A company markets a consumer product that's quietly harming the same communities you've been serving for decades. So the practice expanded — into class actions for wage theft, consumer fraud, product liability, sexual abuse — not because we wanted to diversify, but because our clients and their families needed us to. The core of the firm is still injured workers in the trades. But now we go after all the ways their families are being harmed, on and off the jobsite.
