For Jeremy Heisler, a single overlooked case became a turning point—one that would chart the course of decades spent reshaping workplace justice. This journey began not with a plan, but with a corporate misfit—an accountant who was too honest for his own good. The first firm he joined didn’t practice employment law. But one day, an accountant from a large pharmaceutical company came forward, claiming he had been fired at 59—too old, too outspoken, too honest about the financial manipulations he had uncovered. No one else at the firm wanted the case. “Let the new guy do it,” they said. Jeremy, two years out of law school and 28 years old, took it.

The litigation lasted twelve years. Twelve years of watching how power behaves when it believes it’s untouchable; twelve years of learning how the law could be both an instrument of cruelty and, if wielded with care, an equalizer. That case, Murphy v. American Home Products Corp., would ultimately change the landscape of employment discrimination law in New York, extending the statute of limitations and affirming the right to a jury trial under the New York State Human Rights Law—and by necessary extension, the New York City Human Rights Law. But for Jeremy, it also marked something deeper: an awakening.

“I didn’t set out to be an employment lawyer,” he reflects, “but sometimes the shortest distance between two points isn’t a straight line.”

At Sanford Heisler Sharp McKnight, Jeremy has since become synonymous with landmark victories that have redefined the contours of workplace justice: a $99 million overtime pay verdict against Novartis, a case that returned dignity and restitution to 7,700 current and former sales representative who were not paid overtime. Yet when he speaks about these cases, he rarely mentions the numbers. Instead, he talks about the people: the women who spoke up against powerful institutions, the workers who refused to be invisible, the clients who placed their faith in a system that often feels indifferent to human suffering.

Jeremy’s legal philosophy is not born from abstraction but from lived observation. “Democracy,” he says, “can’t thrive amid such wealth concentration.” Jeremy remains hopeful about the future of the field. He worries about political polarization and the erosion of trust in institutions but believes in the law’s capacity to correct itself through the persistence of those who refuse to give up. “The work can be frustrating,” he admits, “but it’s meaningful. That’s what keeps you going.”

Outside the courtroom, Jeremy’s world expands into literature—Shakespeare, in particular. His fascination with Julius Caesar began in a religious Jewish high school in Brooklyn, where he discovered that the language of power and betrayal transcends centuries. Later, sitting in the open air of Shakespeare in the Park, he found that even the comedies carried the pulse of modern politics: tragedy, ambition, and the absurdities of human pride.

For Jeremy, literature and law share a strange kinship. Both are languages of consequence: frameworks through which we narrate justice, articulate injury, and, sometimes, imagine redemption. The worlds of Othello, Measure for Measure and a whistleblower are not so far apart: both are stories of truth-telling, of the loneliness that follows when you challenge power.

In conversation, colleagues describe Jeremy as someone who can turn even the most tense case discussion into a moment of laughter. His presence is often punctuated by an unexpected story from his early career, or just as easily, by an aside about one of his favorite mammals, the quokka, or about his bête noire, the six legged arachnoid, commonly known as the lantern fly. Jeremy brings sharp insight and humor to every room, making even the toughest work feel human.