Jia Cobb is a Partner at Relman Colfax.
Jia litigates cases at the intersection of criminal justice and civil rights, advancing the firm’s police accountability practice. She regularly represents clients whose rights have been violated by public and private entities or by individual police officers, including cases involving the denial of access to programs and services for incarcerated persons on the basis of disability, unconstitutional conditions of confinement, unlawful seizures, excessive force, and other misconduct. In Kovari v. Brevard Extraditions, et al., she successfully defeated summary judgment in a suit against private prisoner transportation companies who subjected her client to inhumane and unconstitutional conditions of confinement. She is also lead counsel in Hicks v. Ferreyra, et al., in which a unanimous panel of the Fourth Circuit upheld the denial of qualified immunity, establishing for the first time in the Circuit that officers who fail to present claims regarding the availability of Bivens remedies at the trial stage waive their rights to do so on appeal.
Jia maintains a varied civil rights litigation docket. Recently, in CNY Fair Housing, et al. v. Waterbury, et al., she represented nine plaintiffs in a federal lawsuit against a landlord for pervasive quid pro quo sexual harassment. That case resulted in a consent decree that provided $400,000 in monetary relief, as well as injunctive provisions that prevent the landlord from continuing to manage his properties. In Hardin v. Dadlani, et al., a jury awarded her client $687,000 in compensatory and punitive damages for discriminatory termination on the basis of race. She also routinely represents individuals and organizations in fair housing cases, including those involving discrimination against families with children and on the basis of disability.
Jia is an experienced trial lawyer who has tried dozens of cases to verdict. In addition to her trial practice, she frequently trains and lectures on topics related to trial preparation and advocacy. She has taught trial advocacy as an adjunct professor at American University Washington College of Law and for Harvard Law School’s Trial Advocacy Workshop. In 2016, Jia was elected by her peers of the District of Columbia Bar to serve as a member of the Criminal Law and Individual Rights Steering Committee (now Community) for a three-year term.
Prior to joining the firm, Jia worked for many years as a trial attorney at the Public Defender Service for the District of Columbia, where she represented indigent clients charged with serious criminal offenses, supervised and trained new lawyers, and was a member of a specialized practice group that focused on handling complex cases involving forensic science and other expert witness testimony. She graduated from Harvard Law School, cum laude, where she was the Coordinating Editor of the Harvard Law Review and received the Heyman Fellowship. She clerked for the Honorable Diane P. Wood on the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit.