Lawyer 'broke out of the closet' after partner berated him; LGBTQ+ groups are now his clients
Anthony Sbardellati had an epiphany as a BigLaw first-year associate. He was working on a trial team, taking depositions and writing motions. A firm rainmaker summoned him into his office regarding a brief the 26-year-old had written.
“And he says, ‘Hey, Anthony. Would you go get that piece of s- - -?’” Sbardellati recalls.
Taken aback by the comment, Sbardellati went to a nearby conference room to get a printed copy of his brief. And then it happened.
“He proceeds to berate me for 30 minutes straight about how awful my writing is, how stupid I am. And what a piece of crap this is, what a waste of his time it was to read it,” Sbardellati says.
There were other instances of abuse directed at Sbardellati—from public humiliation in meetings to misspelling his name in emails. On the day of the brief incident, two things transpired. First, Sbardellati received a valuable lesson in how to handle people in uncomfortable situations. Second, although he was gay, he was not out, and it was then he decided to live authentically.
Sbardellati says he “broke out of the closet” at that moment. “I was like, I can’t hide this anymore. I can’t deal with all this stress. I can’t juggle all this madness and continue to pretend to be somebody I’m not,” he says.
Now based in Culver City, California, Sbardellati is a Grove Law partner who handles management-side labor and employment cases.
Growing up in a religious family in Orange County, California, during the ’80s and ’90s, Sbardellati says the messaging in his community, church and school was hostile toward people who were gay, and he suppressed who he was throughout his childhood and early adulthood.
While enrolled at UCLA, Sbardellati told his brother, sister and friends that he was gay. One evening, he told his parents while dining at a restaurant, after everyone had had some wine and was relaxed. His father, a dentist, and his mother, an artist, both had visions of their son being “a straight white man with a wife and children, living a traditional life.” His mom took it well, offering support and acceptance. His dad’s initial response: crickets. He was silent for the rest of the dinner.
While attending UCLA, Sbardellati reasoned that he would go to law school because he felt the prestige of being a lawyer would empower him.
“You know, if I achieve financially, if I achieve intellectually, if I obtain this education and this position of power, people will have to accept me for who I am,” Sbardellati says, realizing now that was “broke-brain” thinking. In 2006, he received his JD from the University of Southern California Gould School of Law.
Sbardellati, 45, started his career at Sheppard Mullin Richter & Hampton, where he says he learned how to be a lawyer. He joined LTL Attorneys in 2015 when it was a growing litigation boutique with offices in Los Angeles, San Francisco and Irvine, California. The first day on the job, he was asked to take over 20 single-plaintiff lawsuits filed against a large popular retailer. Noting the disarray of the cases, he decided to identify four he could settle quickly. This allowed him to focus on the more complex cases.
“None of them went to trial,” he says. “But I maintained that account and that relationship with that client for my entire time at LTL. They essentially renewed with the firm because of the way that I turned it around.”
He left LTL in 2018 and went to Constangy, Brooks, Smith & Prophete in a senior counsel role. There he met and began working with current Grove Law partners Sarah Kroll-Rosenbaum and Nancy Sotomayor.
“Working with Sarah was a game changer for me,” Sbardellati says. “I finally met someone who completely recognized and understood my strengths, appreciated my authenticity and unique approach to the practice of law, and wholeheartedly encouraged me to lean into my true self rather than fit a preconceived mold/narrative of how a corporate defense attorney should operate.”
In 2022, he left Constangy to join Kroll-Rosenbaum and Sotomayor at Akerman. The three worked together until July 2025, when they departed to launch Grove Law.
In the fall of 2025, Grove Law authored an amicus brief on behalf of the Transgender Law Center, the Genders & Sexualities Alliance Network and PFLAG in Little v. Hecox. The case involved athletes challenging an Idaho law that banned transgender females from women’s sports teams. In June, the court found that under Title IX and the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment, states can determine eligibility for sports based on biological gender. Twenty-seven states have enacted laws restricting transgender athletes; Idaho was the first to do so in 2020.
The brief Sbardellati worked on with his Grove colleague Elizabeth Puccio-Williams entails the personal stories of transgender athletes impacted by bans and transgender youth who lived in states permitting them to play sports on teams. In June, the U.S. Supreme Court held in a 6-3 vote concerning Hecox and another West Virginia case that transgender girls and women can be banned from competing on women’s and girls’ teams.
“Part of the reason why this [case] was so important to me has much less to do with the legal issues involved and much more to do with my desire to give voice to a group of people that have been maligned, unfairly scapegoated and used as political pawns,” Sbardellati says.
Some states still permit transgender youths to play on sports teams that align with their gender identity, but there are still challenges, he says.
Sbardellati says he has seen change, especially in how his dad views the LGBTQ+ community.
Fast-forward 20 years after he first revealed to his father that he was gay: “Now, he’s like a trans rights activist, you know, showing up in all the places.”
#MyPathToLaw is a guest column that celebrates the diversity of the legal profession through attorneys’ first-person stories detailing their unique and inspiring trajectories.
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