Amber L. Schubert

Of Counsel Attorney

Office: San Francisco, CA

Amber L. Schubert is Partner at AWKO Law LLP and Of Counsel at AWKO, where she leads the firm's Data Breach & Privacy Subdivision. She has built a national practice at the leading edge of data-breach and consumer-privacy litigation, representing people whose most sensitive information (medical records, financial data, educational histories, private communications, and digital identities) has been exposed or misused.

Ms. Schubert's cases sit at the intersection of law, technology, and corporate accountability. She brings command of the issues that often determine whether complex privacy cases succeed such as technical discovery, standing, rapidly evolving privacy statutes, multistate claims, class wide damages, and remedies designed not only to compensate consumers, but also to change the practices that put their information at risk.

Courts across the country have appointed Ms. Schubert to leadership positions in dozens of data privacy class actions, including as lead or co-lead counsel, liaison counsel, and a member of plaintiffs' executive and steering committees. Her current leadership docket includes cases involving some of the largest and most consequential privacy incidents in the country.

Ms. Schubert serves as Interim Co-Lead Class Counsel in In re Blue Shield of California Privacy Litigation, arising from the alleged disclosure of the protected health information of 4.7 million subscribers to Google and Meta. She is also Interim Co-Lead Class Counsel in litigation involving breaches at Discord and Russell Cellular, affecting approximately 1.7 million Discord users and 6.3 million Russell Cellular and Verizon customers, respectively, in the iRhythm data breach class action, and Interim Class Counsel in data breach litigation involving the private travel records of 1.2 million WestJet passengers.

She serves on Plaintiffs' Steering Committee in In re PowerSchool Holdings, Inc. Customer Security Breach Litigation, an MDL involving the financial, health, and academic information of 62.4 million students and 9.5 million teachers, and on Plaintiffs' Executive Committee in the Instructure data breach class action, in which a threat actor allegedly compromised approximately 275 million records across nearly 9,000 educational institutions worldwide. Ms. Schubert is also Liaison Counsel and a member of the Executive Committee in litigation arising from the Salesforce data breach, and Liaison Counsel in Doe v. GoodRx Holdings, Inc., which concerns the alleged sharing of approximately 50 million consumers' private health information with Meta, Google, and Criteo.

Ms. Schubert's leadership roles reflect substantive responsibility, not simply titles. In the Blue Shield litigation, she briefed and argued the opposition to dismissal of federal Wiretap Act claims. As Lead Counsel in Scott v. Healthcare Management Solutions, she drafted and argued a successful opposition addressing Article III standing and California privacy claims in a Medicare data breach affecting approximately 254,000 people. In the Patelco Credit Union litigation, she helped negotiate a $7.25 million settlement for a proposed class of approximately 1.1 million credit-union members.

She has also led some of the most technically demanding work in nationwide privacy litigation. As Chair of the Third-Party Discovery Committee in In re LastPass Data Security Incident Litigation, Ms. Schubert negotiated subpoenas with more than twenty nonparties and briefed four motions to quash in litigation arising from a breach affecting 33 million users. In other major cases, she has directed third-party discovery, developed multistate claims, managed plaintiff vetting, overseen expert work, and taken principal responsibility for briefing dispositive motions and class-certification issues.

Earlier in her career, Ms. Schubert played a central role in the Google AdWords litigation. After her firm secured a landmark Ninth Circuit decision reversing the denial of class certification and establishing important precedent concerning class wide damages, Ms. Schubert served as primary counsel opposing Google's petition for certiorari in the U.S. Supreme Court. The litigation ultimately resulted in a $22.5 million class wide settlement. The Ninth Circuit's decision, Pulaski & Middleman, LLC v. Google, Inc., has since been cited hundreds of times.

Beyond her courtroom work, Ms. Schubert helps shape the developing law and practice of data privacy. She serves on the Board of the American Association for Justice's Consumer Privacy and Data Breach Litigation Group and participates in The Sedona Conference's Data Security and Privacy Liability Working Group. Her work brings together the plaintiffs' bar, defense counsel, industry professionals, and privacy experts to address emerging questions surrounding data security, disclosure, and liability.

Ms. Schubert is equally committed to broadening who has the opportunity to lead consequential litigation. An active member of the LGBTQ community, she serves as the American Association for Justice LGBT Caucus's liaison to the organization's FAIR Committee, which works to increase participation and leadership opportunities for trial lawyers from historically underrepresented groups. She is a firm believer that complex cases are better led, and clients better served, when the people making the decisions bring different backgrounds, experiences, and perspectives to the table.