KANTOR & KANTOR - Key Persons
Job Titles:
- Attorney
- Senior Partner
- Attorney Alan E. Kassan / Senior Partner
Alan E. Kassan is a Senior Partner in the Firm and has over 30 years of experience in representing plaintiffs whose insurance benefits have been denied. For the latter half of those years, Alan's law practice has focused on helping people recover their health-related insurance benefits. This includes benefits for life insurance, long term care insurance, long term disability insurance, and health insurance claims when those benefits have been wrongfully denied. In most instances, these benefits are employer-provided and thus governed by the Federal laws of ERISA. Individual claims are governed by state laws, and are subject to the remedies for insurance bad faith, including the recovery of punitive damages. Alan has vast experience in both of these areas of law.
Alan has also acted as a Judge Pro Tem, a volunteer mediator, and has been active with a variety of professional and non-profit Boards and Associations over the last many years, and currently serves as immediate Past President on the Board of Trustees for the San Fernando Valley Bar Association. He has been selected year over year as a "Super Lawyer" signifying a high-degree of peer recognition and professional achievement. The selection process includes independent research, peer nominations, and peer evaluations to rate outstanding lawyers from more than 70 practice areas.
Alan is a frequent speaker in the areas of law he practices and among many others, has made presentations to the following groups: The Los Angeles Home Health Council, National Multiple Sclerosis Society, the California Association of Health Care Services at Home; the National Association for Home Care and Hospice; Western Region Geriatric Care Managers; California Advocates for Nursing Home Reform; Private Duty Home Care Association, North Valley Regional Chamber of Commerce.
Alan was born and raised in the San Fernando Valley. He is married, and with his wife raised their four sons in the Valley. Alan is also an avid outdoorsman and accomplished landscape photographer.
Job Titles:
- Attorney
- Attorney Andrew M. Kantor / Associate
As you can imagine, as the son of Glenn & Lisa Kantor, Associate Attorney Andrew Kantor grew up on a steady diet of client advocacy and passionate representation. While many children would set out to become anything but an attorney in response to such an upbringing, Andrew knew there was no other path for him.
Upon graduating from college, Andrew worked at Kantor & Kantor as an intake director. When in law school, he worked as a legal extern for Consumer Watchdog, a public consumer organization specializing in consumer-side insurance issues in the class-action context.
Andrew's practice is focused primarily on helping individuals obtain wrongfully denied disability and life insurance benefits in both the ERISA and non-ERISA (bad faith) policies. Since beginning his career at Kantor & Kantor, Andrew has helped hundreds of clients secure wrongfully denied disability benefits, including his most recent victory in Renault v. UNUM wherein he convinced the Court that UNUM's interpretation of its own disability policy to exclude all bonuses and commissions from Ms. Renault's benefit calculation, despite having a commission-based sales position, was improper as a matter of law. Andrew has recently been named as a member of the Community Advisory Council at the Solve ME/CFS Initiative. Andrew also serves on the Board of The Elder Law and Disability Rights Center. In addition, his efforts have been recognized by Super Lawyers, being named a Rising Star in Southern California from 2019, 2020, and 2021.
Experiences like these have helped position Andrew as one of the country's leading experts on fighting disability denials for individuals with chronic-fatigue related illnesses, including ME/CFS and Lyme disease.
Job Titles:
- Attorney
- Attorney Anna Martin / Partner
- Vice - Chair for the Health and Disability Committee of the American Bar Association Tort Trial
Anna has more than 28 years of experience in insurance law, including life, accident, disability, property and casualty, liability, reinsurance, key man, ERISA and bad faith.
Anna dedicates her time and energy to advocating for those whose insurance claims have been improperly denied. Before joining Kantor & Kantor, Ms. Martin spent her career as a defense attorney. She began her career as an associate at Adams, Duque & Hazeltine, then operated her own law firm, Rimac & Martin, for 19 years. Anna finished her defense career as a Partner at Meserve, Mumper & Hughes.
As a defense attorney, Anna represented insurers and Lloyd's syndicates through all phases of litigation including jury and court trials, mediation, arbitration and appeals throughout the United States. The skills and knowledge that she developed and gained as a defense attorney make her a particularly strong advocate for individuals whose claims have been denied.
In 2021 Anna became Newsletter Vice-Chair for the Health and Disability Committee of the American Bar Association Tort Trial and Insurance Practice (TIPS). Anna was named a "Super Lawyer" by Northern California Super Lawyers Magazine from 2011-2017, 2020, and 2021. Anna resides in Reno, Nevada, and splits her time between San Francisco and Reno. Anna enjoys spending time with her two grown daughters as well as her mother. She is active in women's issues and animal rescue and advocacy. She is an avid wildlife enthusiast and spends much of her time outdoors.
Job Titles:
- Attorney
- Partner
- Attorney Cari M. Schwartz / Partner
Cari M. Schwartz is a partner with Kantor & Kantor who joined the firm in 2014. Cari's entire legal career has focused on client advocacy. Before joining Kantor & Kantor, Cari spent over a decade representing disabled individuals before the Social Security Administration and helped thousands of individuals obtain their disability benefits.
At Kantor & Kantor, Cari represents individual clients all over the country seeking health benefits pursuant to individual policies and other policies that are exempt from ERISA. In July of 2021, Cari was accepted into the Cancer Legal Resource Center's Professional Panel. The CLRC, a program of the Disability Rights Legal Center, provides confidential and free services nationwide on cancer-related legal issues to anyone affected by cancer. In August of 2021, Cari was invited to join Triage Cancer's Legal Advisory Council. Triage Cancer is a national, nonprofit organization that provides free education on the legal and practical issues affecting people diagnosed with cancer.
Cari was born and raised in the San Fernando Valley, where she still lives with her husband and son. In her spare time, she can be found watching her son play soccer, basketball and/or baseball or in the gym boxing.
Job Titles:
- Attorney
- Partner
- Attorney Elizabeth Hopkins / Partner
Elizabeth Hopkins is a partner at Kantor & Kantor. After a long and fulfilling career at the United States Department of Labor, where she gained substantial experience working on pension, healthcare, and other ERISA issues, she joined the firm in 2018. She represents clients who have been denied a pension, healthcare, disability, and life insurance benefits. She has practiced in the ERISA field since 1989 and is a passionate, knowledgeable, and creative advocate for those who have been denied the employee benefits to which they are entitled.
Prior to joining Kantor & Kantor, Elizabeth worked for three decades at the Department of Labor, where she specialized in appellate litigation and ERISA. From 2002 through 2017, she headed the ERISA appellate and amicus program, where she oversaw nationwide litigation designed to advance the interests of workers and their families with regard to their employee benefits. She filed over 100 friend-of-the-court and party briefs and presented arguments in federal courts of appeals throughout the country and supervised others in doing so. She also participated in formulating departmental positions and briefing ERISA issues in the Supreme Court, where she worked on many of the important ERISA cases of the last two decades. In addition, she worked on a number of regulatory issues and court challenges to ERISA and the Affordable Care Act regulations adopted by the Department of Labor. During her tenure at the Department of Labor, she was a frequent speaker at ERISA conferences and bar-sponsored events and taught numerous classes on ERISA topics and brief writing. She was also the recipient of many awards for her work on particular projects and cases and was one of the first recipients of a prestigious annual award for brief writing.
Throughout her long career, Elizabeth has been motivated by the desire to help others and to fight for justice for individuals. In addition to her paid work, Elizabeth has been involved in many activities with the District of Columbia Bar and the American Bar Association. She is a member of the American College of Employee Benefits Counsel, where she has served as a judge on their annual writing competition. She has been a contributing writer and editor on the American Bar Association's, Employee Benefits Law, and has recently been appointed to serve on the Board of Senior Editors for that publication. Elizabeth is also a life-long volunteer for a wide range of organizations, from the Special Olympics to a homeless shelter, to the Red Cross, to an after-school program at a Los Angeles public high school. Most recently, she traveled to Dilley, Texas to represent detained migrant women and their children claiming asylum.
Elizabeth is very excited to bring her skill and experience to representing clients at Kantor & Kantor with their ERISA claims.
Job Titles:
- Attorney
- Partner
- Attorney Elizabeth K. Green / Partner
Elizabeth K. Green is a partner with Kantor & Kantor who joined the firm at its inception in 2004. Elizabeth represents individual clients seeking health benefits pursuant to ERISA benefit plans. She has developed a specific focus on mental health benefits and particularly the protections provided by federal and state mental health parity laws. Elizabeth enjoys the unique challenges of ERISA and health law and being an effective advocate for her clients.
Elizabeth's legal career has focused on representing individuals to obtain insurance benefits. Elizabeth has also represented individuals seeking long term care, disability, and life insurance benefits at Kantor & Kantor. Following law school, Elizabeth represented insureds to obtain homeowners' insurance benefits at Quisenberry & Kabateck LLP.
Elizabeth was born in Illinois, raised in Southern California, and lives in Glendale with her husband and their three children. On weekends, she enjoys running the trails in Griffith Park and watching her kids' soccer games.
Job Titles:
- Attorney
- Attorney Glenn R. Kantor / Founding Partner
- Founding Partner of Kantor & Kantor LLP
- Why Founding Partner
Glenn Kantor is a founding partner of Kantor & Kantor LLP. As a young attorney, Glenn saw the injustice of wrongful insurance denials and created a law firm to represent individuals seeking to obtain their rightful benefits. Glenn is committed to ensure that clients receive the benefits they are entitled to under their insurance policies or group health plans. [Attorney Bio]
Glenn Kantor is a founding partner of Kantor & Kantor LLP. As a young attorney, Glenn saw the injustice of wrongful insurance denials and created a law firm to represent individuals seeking to obtain their rightful benefits. Glenn is committed to ensure that clients receive the benefits they are entitled to under their insurance policies or group health plans.
In the past 20 years, Glenn has represented thousands of individuals suffering a wide range of medical conditions including:
Multiple Sclerosis
Lupus
Crohn's Disease
HIV/AIDS
Parkinson's Disease
Alzheimer's Disease
Spine and back injuries
Cardiac disease
Depression
Drug & alcohol addiction
Glenn also represents family members to obtain wrongfully withheld life insurance benefits in situations regarding DUI deaths, domestic partnerships, failure to disclose, and improper enrollment. He works with elderly clients to help them obtain long-term care benefits that they are entitled to under their long-term care insurance policies.
Job Titles:
- Attorney
- Partner
- Attorney J. David Oswalt / Senior Partner
J. David Oswalt is a Partner with Kantor & Kantor specializing in healthcare class actions. Following a successful career as a shareholder at Arnold & Porter and Quinn, Kully, and Morrow, David embarked on the challenge of litigating health insurance benefits through class actions. David is class counsel for several class actions pending in Los Angeles Superior Court seeking health insurance benefits for mental health treatment.
Jaclyn is a civil litigation attorney, advocating for clients whose property and casualty claims have been wrongfully denied. Specializing in fire and flood losses, Jaclyn is both detail-oriented and outcome driven. Her relatability and desire to develop a genuine connection with others give her a unique advantage in reaching amicable resolutions.
For the first decade of her career, Jaclyn represented insurance companies in bad faith, fraud, and all forms of coverage-related litigation. She has handled both state and federal cases, advocating for insurance carriers in legal venues throughout California and Pennsylvania. Jaclyn also advised large multinational insurance companies on coverage opinions, addressing complex issues under a wide array of insurance lines, including homeowners, D&O, commercial general and automobile liability policies. As a defense attorney, Jaclyn developed keen insight into the insurance industry, which she now applies to her representation of insureds.
Jaclyn is a New Jersey native with bicoastal ties. Outside the office, Jaclyn can be found at Orangetheory Fitness or in her home gym. She also loves to travel both domestically and internationally and intends on exploring more of the world with her young son.
During law school, Jaclyn clerked for Judge Joseph E. Irenas for the United States District of New Jersey. In college, Jaclyn was the Captain and President of the Rutgers Women's Rugby Football Club. Jaclyn has taken her competitive spirit and leadership skills on the rugby field and applied them to all aspects of her life
Job Titles:
- Attorney
- Attorney Lisa S. Kantor / Founding Partner
- Founding Partner of Kantor & Kantor LLP
Lisa Kantor is a founding partner of Kantor & Kantor LLP. Lisa has focused her law practice on representing individuals whose health benefits have been denied for treatment of physical or mental illnesses.
Since 2007, Lisa has been a nationwide advocate for patients suffering eating disorders and litigating denials of medically necessary treatment for eating disorders. Through Lisa's dedication to her clients, Kantor & Kantor has become the only law firm in the country with a distinct health law practice staffed with attorneys experienced in the specific needs of clients who have been denied benefits for eating disorder treatment.
Job Titles:
- Attorney
- Senior Associate
- Senior Associate / Attorney Susan L. Meter
Peter S. Sessions is a senior associate at Kantor & Kantor who has been with the firm since 2004. Peter represents individual clients seeking health, life, and disability benefits, typically under employee health plans. Peter has litigated cases across the country and has extensive federal appellate experience.
Peter was born in Vermont and went to college in Massachusetts. After college, he lived in New York for two years, where he worked for the New York County District Attorney's Office. In 1994, he moved to Los Angeles to attend law school. He currently lives in Los Angeles with his wife and two sons.
Ms. Mermelstein's entire legal career has been devoted to ERISA employee benefits, an area of law she first became familiar with when a hand problem permanently disabled her from her former career as a violinist. Having been a disability claimant herself, Ms. Mermelstein understands the devastation that employees feel upon losing their ability to work, and of the importance of securing specialized first-rate representation to ensure that this loss is not compounded by the additional hardship of an improper benefits denial.
Ms. Mermelstein has a nation-wide reputation for her deep understanding of the ERISA law and her insight is widely sought by plaintiff-side ERISA attorneys.
Ms. Mermelstein specializes in disability claims but will eagerly take on important ERISA issues that arise in life, AD&D, or pension cases. The majority of her time is spent drafting briefs to trial and appellate courts throughout the nation and, where necessary, drafting memoranda to facilitate mediation and settlement.
Job Titles:
- Attorney
- Attorney Susan L. Meter / Senior Associate
- Senior Associate / Attorney Susan L. Meter
Job Titles:
- Associate
- Attorney
- Attorney Tim Rozelle / Associate
Tim Rozelle is an Associate Attorney with Kantor & Kantor, the nation's largest ERISA plaintiffs' firm. Tim has significant professional experience in the field of health benefits. He joined Kantor & Kantor LLP in 2014 after graduating from the University of California, Davis School of Law. Tim accepts and has represented many clients who have been wrongfully denied surgical, medical, mental/behavioral health, and prescription drug benefits by insurance carriers.
Tim currently has focused a large amount of his practice on assisting individuals who have been denied proton beam radiation therapy (PBT) for the treatment of cancer. In 2019, Tim started the Proton Therapy Law Coalition, a group specifically formed to bring providers, patient advocates, patients, and attorneys together to challenge PBT denials wherever they may arise across the country. The Coalition currently includes more than 70 members who have undertaken nationwide efforts to combat insurance companies' denials of PBT.
Tim is quite active in the American Bar Association. Tim recently became the Tort Trial and Insurance Practice (TIPS) Vice-Chair to the Employee Benefits Committee, as well as the Social Media Chair of the Employee Benefits Committee of ABA's Labor & Employment Law Section (LEL).
Tim grew up in Pasadena, California and attended UCLA for undergrad. When he has free time, he manages and plays in recreational co-ed softball leagues, visits Civil War battlefields across the country and roots for the Lakers as they seek to obtain title number 18.
Zoya Yarnykh joined Kantor & Kantor after spending several years working at a San Francisco-based nonprofit agency, where her work focused on advocating on behalf of individuals with disabilities in Social Security benefits appeals. Throughout her career, Ms. Yarnykh has exclusively represented plaintiffs, first in toxic tort litigation involving serious illnesses related to asbestos exposure, and more recently, she practiced civil rights law in the context of education of children with disabilities, with a focus on the abuse of special needs children in the school setting.
In her spare time, Zoya enjoys spending time with her daughter, husband, and two dogs, reading crime fiction, traveling, and her SUP. Zoya is fluent in Russian.
Job Titles:
- Attorney
- Attorney Brent Dorian Brehm / Partner
Brent Dorian Brehm is an accomplished attorney practicing in the fields of disability, life, health, and long term care insurance benefits. He has spent his entire career in the trenches battling multi-billion dollar insurance companies to protect his client's rights. His efforts have been recognized by three legal magazines, being named a Lawyer on the Fast Track by The Recorder, a Top 20 Lawyer Under 40 by the Daily Journal, and a Super Lawyer by Super Lawyers magazine.
Brent has spent his career with Kantor & Kantor LLP - one of the preeminent firms in the area of ERISA (Employee Retirement Income Security Act) and Insurance Bad Faith litigation. While with the firm, Brent has resolved well over 250 disputes with insurance companies on behalf of his clients. As a partner of the firm, Brent has developed a body of motion and trial experience few attorneys have compiled to this point, or any point, in their career.
Brent was born in Los Angeles' San Gabriel Valley and now lives in its San Fernando Valley with his wife and their three energetic daughters. Before having children, he had the time to train for, and completed, two Ironman distance triathlons, the New York Marathon, the Los Angeles Marathon, and a 200-mile bike ride through Death Valley. He currently enjoys cartography.
Job Titles:
- Medical Records Specialist
Job Titles:
- California Insurance Commissioner
Job Titles:
- Attorney
- Attorney Rhonda Harris Buckner
Rhonda has spent her entire career representing individuals against the abuses of the insurance industry. After graduating from Santa Clara University Law School in 1992, Rhonda obtained extensive insurance bad faith litigation experience, handling a variety of insurance bad faith cases involving all types of insurance claims, including: Homeowners (earthquake, fire, mold, and water claims), Liability, Health, Life/Accidental Death and Disability (group and individual policies).
Since 2002, Rhonda has focused her practice on helping individuals whose insurance companies have denied their claims for disability, life/accidental death, long-term care, and health insurance benefits. Rhonda especially enjoys assisting clients with the filing of administrative appeals should their denied claim be subject to ERISA. Under ERISA, an insured must file an administrative appeal before they can file a lawsuit against their insurance company. Throughout her career, Rhonda has obtained multi-million-dollar settlements and judgments on behalf of her clients and on appeal overturned hundreds of denied ERISA claims. However, whether a client's claim is large or small, Rhonda gives each client's case the time, attention and care it deserves.
When she is not fighting for her clients, Rhonda enjoys spending time with her husband and Labrador retriever, playing tennis, scuba diving and traveling.