About Rudolph Delson
I try to be intelligent, compassionate and—on behalf of my clients—relentless. Let me tell you where I come from.
My mother was born in Germany under the Nazis; her family were Lutherans, but lost everything when they fled west in the 1940s. She came to America in her early twenties, and during my childhood made a successful businesswoman of herself. From her I inherited the hope that America should be the place where anyone who is willing to work hard should have the chance to do well. From her I also inherited a war refugee’s disgust at the way the powerful abuse their power.
My father was born into a Jewish family of folk singers and socialists. From him I inherited my pacifism, and with it the belief that if you want a world without violence, you must ensure that people follow the law. My father was more pessimistic about America than my mother ever was; from him I inherited the belief that too often this country fails those who work the longest and hardest. And he put it into my ear young to watch what America does to its Black and brown citizens, and to anyone who isn’t straight.
I have a wife and three small children, a little library, and a little garden. So if you want a lawyer who wears a Rolex and drives a Mercedes, you’ve got the wrong guy. What I care about is fairness. I have clients who were paid less than minimum wage. I also have clients who were paid seven figures a year. I want justice for all of them.
If you’ve read this far into an About Me, you presumably want to know my credentials. I graduated at the top of my class from San Jose High, the second oldest public high school in California, and went to Stanford, where I graduated Phi Beta Kappa with degrees in Mathematics and Linguistics. After a stint at the Antitrust Division of the United States Department of Justice, I attended N.Y.U. School of Law on full academic scholarship, where I worked in the Civil Rights Clinic and on Law Review. I clerked in San Francisco, for former Chief Judge James Browning on the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, before returning to New York to begin my legal career at Simpson Thacher & Bartlett LLP.
In 2009 I became the first attorney to join Mandel Bhandari LLP, a litigation boutique co-founded by my law school classmate Rishi Bhandari and his partner Evan Mandel, and in 2018 I became of counsel to Granovsky & Sundaresh PLLC, an employment law firm co-founded by another law school classmate, Alex Granovsky and his partner Neeti Sundaresh.
So where do I come from? I am a Californian by birth, an Ohioan by marriage, and a New Yorker because if you are a New Yorker you know you are a New Yorker.