Jack Davis

Associate Attorney, Kershaw Talley Barlow

This story is part of our July 2025 Young Professionals issue, photographed at Bradford Animal Shelter. To learn more about adopting at Bradford, click here.

Sacramento attorney Jack Davis is a bit of a renaissance man. He loves reading novels and short stories; he also likes writing. He regularly dabbles in painting landscapes and cityscapes — mostly acrylic on canvas — and plays the drums. He recently had his first gallery show in downtown Reno. He also enjoys hiking and camping with wife Cindy Shi, a public entity attorney for Best Best & Krieger. The 32-year-old has a unique background as a lawyer but has found that researching, writing and arguing cases is the perfect melding of his many skills and passions.

Born and raised in Buffalo, Minnesota, a small rural town northwest of Minneapolis, Davis attended an art-based high school for creative writing before heading west to attend Lewis & Clark College in Portland. There he studied philosophy and was active in student government. He also learned about a holistic education program near the remote town of Bishop, California, called Deep Springs College. The two-year program accepts just 15 students per year.

“It’s this very unique, very small program that has a Great Books-based seminar style academic program,” he says. In addition, students work and operate a functioning cattle ranch and alfalfa farm using self-governance to organize the labor. While at Deep Springs, Davis made the decision to pursue law. “I thought I might end up in some kind of STEM field because it’s sort of stereotypically useful, but I hadn’t really considered that in a deep way, or if that was my passion.”

Davis had an aptitude for reading and writing and the more he considered pathways, the more he discovered law would be a way to use those skills — while still having the real-world impact he desired. After completing the program at Deep Springs, he transferred to the University of Minnesota to finish his upper division coursework and then enrolled in law school at the same institution. Davis was able to hone his writing skills to serve as a legal writing instructor and editor for the Minnesota Law Review. That’s where he also met his wife. “We met in our first year of law school at the law school’s musical,” he laughs. The students put on a parody musical each year, and both Davis and his wife played in the pit orchestra: Jack on drums and Cindy on piano.

Following law school, the couple moved to Reno where Davis clerked for federal District Judge Anne Traum in the District of Nevada. “She was building chambers and had just been appointed to sit in Reno, which is where I was already living. It was sort of a serendipitous moment,” he recalls. Davis had an opportunity to write court opinions and learn about the inner workings of the court.

“Making someone whole, at least as much as the law is able to, is important work.”

He then accepted a role in private practice with Kershaw Talley Barlow in Sacramento where he currently practices as an associate attorney. He primarily works on the firms’ large class-action cases, including two drinking water contamination cases in Jackson, Mississippi, and Benton Harbor, Michigan. He spearheaded an appeal to the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals in the Jackson case, taking the lead on writing the briefing. “A lot of last year was spent working on that. It was amazing and something I could sink my teeth into. I was able to research constitutional issues with respect to holding government entities liable,” he explains. The case is still being decided.

Davis also worked on a big auto defect case where the manufacturer tried to force arbitration, which is less equitable for the consumer. He briefed and argued against the arbitration and won. The class action case is now on appeal. “Making someone whole, at least as much as the law is able to, is important work. In auto defect cases, for example, ordinary working folks may incur expenses over $1,000 replacing something that is a safety issue or should have been covered by a warranty,” he says. “To be able to deliver an actual material win for these folks is meaningful.”

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