Rachel Terp

Attorney Rachel Terp specializes in employment discrimination, harassment, whistleblower, retaliation, and wage and hour litigation. Ms. Terp has represented clients in state and federal court, administrative agencies, and pre-litigation negotiations. She has succeeded in bringing and opposing summary adjudication and discovery motions, briefed, argued for, and obtained approval of class and collective action settlements, litigated cases to the eve of trial, and second chaired a bench trial that resulted in the precedent-setting California appellate decision Turman v. Superior Court.

Ms. Terp is an active member of the California Employment Lawyers Association (CELA). She currently serves as the Vice Chair of CELA’s Education Committee, as a member of CELA’s Wage and Hour Committee, and previously served on CELA’s Nominating Committee. Ms. Terp also volunteers as a supervising attorney for Legal Aid At Work’s workers rights’ clinics.

Ms. Terp was selected to the 2024 Northern California Super Lawyers list, and was named to the Rising Stars list every year from 2017 to 2023. She was the 2014 recipient of the East Bay Community Law Center’s (EBCLC) Advocate of Justice Award for her work drafting a bill proposal that formed the basis for the Fair Debt Buying Practices Act of 2013.

In addition to running her own firm, from 2022 to 2023, Ms. Terp was Of-Counsel at Levy Vinick Burrell Hyams LLP. From 2013 to 2019, Ms. Terp was a senior associate and associate at Bryan Schwartz Law. At these boutique law firms, she counseled employees and represented workers in complex wage and hour class actions as well as individual discrimination, harassment, and retaliation cases.

As a student at Berkeley Law, Ms. Terp served as the Executive Director for the Berkeley Journal of Employment and Labor Law, as an extern with the Honorable Susan Y. Illston of the United States District Court for the Northern District of California, and as a Coblentz Civil Rights Fellow at the Warren Institute on Law and Social Policy. She worked as a summer law clerk at Cotchett Pitre & McCarthy and the EBCLC. Prior to attending law school, she was a Civil Rights Analyst with the Voting Section of the United States Department of Justice and a Fulbright Scholar.