Erin Meyer knew she wanted to be a trial lawyer from the moment she set foot in a courtroom during her first year at Yale Law School. Representing an elderly woman in a foreclosure case through a Community Legal Services clinic, she discovered something that would define the next two decades of her career.
"Advocating for a client, telling their story and doing my best to achieve their goals resonated with me in a way that no other professional endeavor has," she said.
Nearly 17 years into her career -- 14 of them at Keker, Van Nest & Peters LLP -- Meyer has built a practice that spans industries and areas of law, always with an eye toward trial. At Keker, she never had to narrow her focus to a single practice group, moving instead across sectors and technologies, developing expertise as the work demands it.
"The breadth of my practice has really satisfied my intellectual curiosity -- I never get complacent or burnt out because I can always challenge myself in new ways," she said.
In the fall of 2023, Meyer represented Sutter Health in a qui tam case brought under California's Insurance Fraud Prevention Act. State of California ex rel. Duncan and Hulbert v. Sutter Health et al., RG17846895 (Alameda Super. Ct., filed Jan. 25, 2017).
Relators alleged that Sutter committed insurance fraud by having anesthesiologists perform unnecessary nerve-block procedures and by billing for needless post-operative recovery room care, seeking more than $500 million. The case went to a seven-week bench trial in Alameda Superior Court.
The case turned on a question with implications for health care providers across the state: whether a third-party expert or non-treating physician could second-guess the good-faith medical decisions of treating physicians and thereby establish a fraud claim. On June 17, 2024, Judge Stephen Kaus ruled in Sutter's favor on all counts, finding the charges were medically appropriate and consistent with industry standard billing practices.
Meyer cross-examined the lead relator and a key expert and delivered half of Sutter's closing argument. But she pointed to something else as the case's defining quality.
"The real highlight for me was working with a team of Keker partners, associates and staff that provided our client with top-notch representation day-in and day-out throughout the seven-week trial and beyond," she said.
In the fall of 2024, Meyer secured a complete defense verdict in a Santa Clara Superior Court case in which a Fortune 500 secure networking company faced fraud and breach-of-warranty claims tied to a 2017 equipment purchase.
The jury rejected nine-figure compensatory damages and additional punitive damages after four weeks of evidence, and in the summer of 2025, the court issued an eight-figure fees and costs award. The case required her team to get up to speed on five years of litigation within weeks of being retained, with trial just months away.
Outside commercial work, Meyer has taken on immigration cases she describes as among the most significant of her career. In 2025, she filed habeas petitions for asylum seekers unlawfully detained during immigration court appearances and ICE check-ins, obtaining orders for their release. She then joined attorneys from the ACLU of Northern California and Centro Legal de la Raza in a class action challenging ICE's policy of re-detaining individuals it had previously released without legal basis. In December 2025, the court certified the class and stayed the policy -- a ruling ICE said rendered it "non-operational" in the Bay Area.
"Defending the rule of law, and the most vulnerable in our community who are being targeted by the government, is something all lawyers should be stepping up to do," Meyer said.
Reprinted with permission from The Daily Journal. ©2026 Daily Journal Corporation. All rights reserved. Reprinted by ReprintPros 949-702-5390.