Frontier Law Center Wins Top 50 Bench Award for Religious Discrimination Case

Manny Starr tried this case on behalf of Frontier Law Center alongside co-counsel Alan Reinach and Jonathon Cherne, both of whom practice with the Church State Council, a religious liberty legal organization, and both of whom argued portions of the trial themselves. What separates Katz from nearly every other result on this list is that it never settled. Los Angeles County had more than one opportunity to resolve the matter before the case reached a courtroom, chose instead to defend its conduct at trial, and then lost on the record it built for itself.

The rulings that followed reach further than this one plaintiff. The judge found that the County’s process for evaluating religious accommodation requests was arbitrary and capricious, a standard that, as Cornell’s Legal Information Institute explains, originates in federal administrative law and asks whether a decision-maker genuinely engaged with the facts before it rather than settling on an outcome and reasoning backward from there. The court also upheld a separate finding of retaliation, and those two holdings together produced the $911,612 award along with an order restoring the client to the job she lost.

TopVerdict.com checks every submission against court records before it publishes a ranking. That verification is why a spot on this list means something beyond a firm’s own claim. The site breaks its rankings out separately for each state and each type of case. Only entries with real documentation make the cut. A bench trial win is also rarer to see on these lists than a settlement. Most cases, after all, never reach a verdict at all. The full Top 50 Bench Awards list shows how this result compares to others across the state. For a broader view of Frontier Law Center’s own record, the accomplishments page lists other discrimination and retaliation results, including several that closed well before trial.