Peter Romer-Friedman is a Principal and Founder of Peter Romer-Friedman Law PLLC, and Head of the firm’s District of Columbia office.

Peter is an experienced public interest lawyer and advocate who maintains a dynamic and innovative practice in which he represents individual workers and other victims of corporate and government abuses, non-profit organizations and unions, and plaintiffs in class action lawsuits. Peter focuses his practice on a range of legal areas, including employment discrimination, constitutional rights, fair housing, public accommodations, credit discrimination, consumer protection, and defamation.  

Over the past 15 years, Peter has obtained over $1.4 billion in relief and systemic reforms by major corporations and governments, and he has secured some of the largest and most novel settlements under a range of federal laws. 

Peter’s civil rights cases often seek to solve entrenched and emerging problems with novel approaches, like combating biased digital technologies, advocating for equal paid parental leave and fertility benefits for all workers, ensuring that banks maintain and market foreclosed homes equally in communities of color, and stopping systemic bias against people of color, women, the LGBTQ community, older people, military reservists, and people with disabilities. 

Peter’s varied clients have included workers from many industries, national labor unions, fair housing civil rights groups, national veterans’ organizations, public officials, and staffers of both major political parties, whistleblowers, consumers, small businesses, farmers, and a bankruptcy trustee. He represents his clients in whatever forum will vindicate their rights, from trial and appellate courts, to administrative agencies, to the halls of Congress and the media.

Before founding Peter Romer-Friedman Law PLLC in 2023, Peter was a Principal and Head of the Civil Rights and Class Actions Practice at Gupta Wessler PLLC, a national appellate, constitutional, and complex litigation boutique that only handles public interest cases. Peter was also a partner at Outten & Golden LLP, one of the largest workers’ rights law firms, where he opened the firm’s D.C. office with David Lopez, the former General Counsel of the EEOC. Before that Peter was the Deputy Director of Litigation of the Washington Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights and Urban Affairs. 

Before Peter started his litigation career as a civil rights attorney at Cohen Milstein Sellers & Toll, he was a law clerk to Judge Stephen Reinhardt of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit and labor counsel to the U.S. Senate Labor Committee and its Chairman, Senator Edward M. Kennedy. He has also taught civil rights law as an Adjunct Professor at Georgetown Law. 

Peter graduated from Columbia Law School, where he was a James Kent Scholar and Harlan Fiske Stone Scholar, and externed with Judge Shira Sheindlin of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York. He earned his B.A. in economics with honors from the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, and he was selected as a Truman Scholar by the Harry S. Truman Scholarship Foundation. 

Before law school, Peter was a legislative representative and union organizer for the United Steelworkers and co-founded the Worker Rights Consortium, a non-profit that monitors labor rights in apparel factories worldwide. He has worked or volunteered for other progressive unions, political campaigns, and organizations including the Communications Workers of America, AFL-CIO, SEIU, UNITE HERE!, the 2008 Obama Presidential Campaign, and United Students Against Sweatshops.

Peter has been recognized for his impactful work as a public interest litigator. SuperLawyers named Peter a Super Lawyer in 2020, 2021, 2022, and 2023 and a Rising Star each year from 2014 to 2019. On two occasions Public Justice selected Peter as a finalist for the Trial Lawyer of the Year Award, for his work on behalf of Native American farmers and ranchers in Keepseagle v. Vilsack and for gay and lesbian employees who were denied spousal health insurance by Walmart in Cote v. Walmart. In addition, LawDragon named Peter one of the 500 Leading Plaintiff Employment Lawyers in 2018, 2019, 2021, and 2022.

Peter’s groundbreaking cases have advanced equal rights, opportunity, and dignity for diverse communities, including by:

• Brokering the first major settlement over digital bias in which Facebook agreed to stop advertisers from steering job, housing, and credit ads away from people based on race, age, and gender, and winning an EEOC ruling that the same practices violate Title VII and the ADEA.

• Recovering approximately $80 million dollars for military reservists and veterans who were denied jobs, pay, retirement contributions, and other employee benefits by employers such as Walmart, Federal Express, U.S. Postal Service, Southwest Airlines, Washington State, L3 Technologies, United Airlines, American Airlines, and the U.S House of Representatives.

• Negotiating the largest reported workplace bias settlement with the U.S. House of Representatives over the wrongful termination of Imran Awan and his co-workers, as well as one of the largest reported settlements with Congress for a whistleblower who sued the Benghazi Committee and its Chairman Trey Gowdy. 

• Winning the first class-action settlement for a group of LGBTQ workers, Walmart employees denied health benefits for their same-sex spouses.

• Curbing racial discrimination in the largest federal housing recovery program on behalf of Black families displaced by Hurricane Katrina and securing hundreds of millions of dollars of recovery relief for them.

• Obtaining a $760 million settlement for thousands of Native American farmers denied USDA loans for decades in one of the largest credit bias settlements in U.S. history.

• Negotiating a $42 million settlement in which Wells Fargo agreed to advertise, service, and sell foreclosed properties equally in white, Black, and Latino communities to address harm from the foreclosure crisis.

• Reaching first-of-their kind settlements with JPMorgan Chase and CNN/Turner Broadcasting to ensure gender equality in paid parental leave.

• Reaching a first-of-its kind $14 million settlement with Walmart over the company’s failure to pay military reservists when they took short-term military leave. 

• Obtaining a settlement with the Daily Caller in a high-profile defamation case in which former House staffers allege they were falsely accused of numerous crimes in a book published by Regnery Publishing/Salem Media Corp and authored by a former Daily Caller reporter.

• Representing students to successfully convince the State Department to end a 2017 freeze of federal diversity programs that annually place dozens of students of color in career U.S. Foreign Service positions.