Yana Henriks

A co-founder and partner at McMurray Henriks LLP, Yana G. Henriks brings a wealth of experience from her decades’ long legal practice. She currently handles cases involving civil rights, police misconduct, medical malpractice, healthcare regulation, products liability, business litigation, real estate and housing, and complex civil litigation. As seen from the following examples, Ms. Henriks is a passionate and successful advocate for consumers and other “little guy” litigants facing seemingly overwhelming odds. Pandemic did not slow  Ms. Henriks' determination to win. Her recent successful result involves: 

• Obtaining $22,000 000.00 confidential settlement in a wrongful death case. 
• Successfully representing Plaintiff in underlying criminal case and then obtaining the settlement of $4 650 000.00 in federal civil rights case Franco v City West Covina. 
• Obtaining $750 000.00 in Terrence Jeffrey v City of Huntington Beach case involving the use of chokeholds by law enforcement officers. 
• Obtaining a favorable settlement for the family of a man who was chased by Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputies into his own back yard after attempting to stop him for riding a bicycle without the appropriate safety equipment. Deputies claimed the man pulled a gun on them. Ms. Henriks successfully argued that the question of whether the deputies had any tattoos that indicated their membership in any of the infamous deputy “cliques” (gangs) was a matter of public interest and justified an order compelling the deputies to disclose their tattoos. The abovementioned deputy cliques/gangs are currently under investigation by the authorities.
• Successfully defending a client from charges of assault on a police officer and subsequently obtaining a favorable settlement for a mentally ill woman who was shot in the abdomen by officers of the Los Angeles Police Department who were responding to a mental health call and claimed she attacked them. The case resulted in a favorable change of the City of Los Angeles and Los Angeles Police Department’s use of force policies.
• Obtaining a favorable settlement for the mother of a man who was accused of attempted burglary and was tazed and beaten by Riverside County sheriff’s deputies and later died.
• Obtaining a favorable settlement in the case of a man who arrested by police as he sat in his car, parked on the side of the street. The case involved allegations of drug planting and false arrest.
• Obtaining a very favorable jury verdict in personal injury case, with difficult facts, for a young African-American woman in a conservative jury venue.
• Obtaining a favorable settlement in a police shooting case on behalf of a family of undocumented immigrants.
• Obtaining a judgment against the Riverside County Sheriff’s Department, including an award of attorney’s fees exceeding $45,000.00, for failing to release investigatory files in the case of a young father who died in deputy custody. The records had been kept from the family for over a year.
• Obtaining a victory in a difficult medical malpractice arbitration against the Kaiser physicians brought by an elder patient with serious pre-existing medical problems.
• Obtaining a large settlement for a licensed vocational nurse who worked at an Orange County jail who was prevented by a sheriff’s deputy from providing medical help to an inmate in need and who was threatened. The case brought attention and prompted action to address existing problems related to inadequate inmate medical care in the Orange County jail system.
• Achieving a published Court of Appeal opinion vindicating the fundamental constitution right of a plaintiff to have her case tried before a jury of her peers, untainted by a racially discriminatory selection process. It was held that the Los Angeles Superior Court committed reversible error where it initially found a prima facie case that defense counsel had impermissibly used his peremptory challenges to exclude six Hispanic prospective jurors in a medical malpractice trial, and where the trial court failed to elicit defense counsel’s justifications for each of the excluded prospective jurors. (Zulma Unzueta v. Asmik Akopyan et al. (2019) 42 Cal.App.5th)
• Achieving a published Court of Appeal opinion expanding the scope of disqualification in situations involving a conflict of interest. (Blue Water Sunset, LLC v. Markowitz (2011) 192 Cal.App.4th)

Ms. Henriks is currently admitted to practice before the various trial and appellate courts of the state of California, as well as before several federal courts, including the U.S. District Courts for the Central and Eastern Districts of California and the Ninth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals.