Cincinnati civil rights attorney Al Gerhardstein moving to 'semi-retirement'

Al Gerhardstein is retiring.

Sort of.

The attorney involved in some of Cincinnati’s biggest civil rights cases – think Sam DuBose, Kyle Plush, Jim Obergefell, Planned Parenthood and the Cincinnati Collaborative Agreement – is wrapping up current cases, getting ready to put his home on the market and splitting his time between a Cincinnati apartment and a new home in St. Paul, Minnesota.

After four decades in the public eye, at age 71, Gerhardstein cops to cutting back.

“But I’m still working on cases here,” he said.

The evidence: Friedman, Gilbert + Gerhardstein gave him an office at its new address, the Executive Building at Seventh and Walnut streets, when the firm gave up space in Carew Tower earlier this month.

A trip down memory lane

Family is motivating Gerhardstein’s semi-retirement.

His wife, Mimi Gingold, is a St. Paul native. Gingold’s two sisters remain in St. Paul. The couple’s new home there is a block from where Gingold grew up.

“Every day is like memory lane for her,” Gerhardstein said.

The couple was also displaced from their Kennedy Heights home of 45 years by an April 2021 fire.

After that, “we were ready to downsize,” said Gingold, a retired teacher.

They also want to be closer to their kids and grandkids. A son lives in St. Paul, with a daughter in nearby Chicago (and a second son in California).

“Ultimately most decisions about where to live involve family,” Gerhardstein said.

Al Gerhardstein has advocated for reproductive rights, gay rights, inmate rights

Alphonse Gerhardstein was raised on a chicken farm near Cleveland. He graduated from Beloit College in Wisconsin in 1973 and law school at New York University three years later.

He began practicing with Cincinnati lawyer Robert Laufman in 1978. By 2006, the firm became Gerhardstein & Branch. After Jennifer Branch was elected a Hamilton County Common Pleas judge in 2020, Gerhardstein combined his practice with a 40-year-old Cleveland firm, Friedman & Gilbert.

Over the years, Gerhardstein has pushed causes as much as cases. He’s advocated for reproductive rights, gay rights and inmate rights, and pushed for new practices in policing (particularly in taser use) and employment.

He created the Cincinnati-based Ohio Justice & Policy Center 25 years ago to support criminal justice reform.

In the 2015 DuBose case, he won a $4.8 million settlement for the family of the man killed by a University of Cincinnati police office – and reforms of UC policing.

In the 2018 Plush case, he won a $6 million settlement for the family of the 16-year-old student who tried to reach 911 before he died in the family van – and reforms to the 911 system.

In the 2002 Collaborative Agreement, he won a $4.5 million settlement and police reforms that are frequently cited as national models.

Even now, as he turns his attention from practicing law to teaching it, he’s most interested in long-term change. In a current course for the Nathaniel R. Jones Center for Race, Gender and Social Justice at UC, he and students are studying the equal protection clause in the Ohio state constitution to see if it will support new legal arguments to counter systemic racism.

When the course wraps up, the Jones Center aims to continue the work.

“He wanted to make sure that it wouldn’t just die off with the course,” said Jenn Dye, the center's director. “He definitely wanted it to be something that would carry on."

Lawyers as civil rights pioneers

Dye first heard about Gerhardstein when she was an 18-year-old intern at Cincinnati’s Murray and Agnes Seasongood Good Government Foundation. While cataloging information about his police reform work, Dye began to see that lawyers could also be civil rights pioneers.

“He made me think more about going into law ... that there are different ways that you can use a law degree,” she said.

Gerhardstein also expanded Jim Obergefell’s sense of possibilities.

After Obergefell and his seriously ill partner flew to Maryland in 2013 to get married – since Ohio did not allow same-sex marriage at the time – Gerhardstein told them Ohio would not recognize their marriage after John Arthur’s impending death.

Gerhardstein showed the couple a blank Ohio death certificate in his first meeting with them.

Under Ohio law, Obergefell would not be listed as Arthur’s surviving spouse, he told them.

“He said ‘Do you want to do something about that?’ ” Obergefell said. “We discussed it for less than a minute and said yes.”

Gerhardstein took the question to court. By 2015, the case had reached the U.S. Supreme Court, which ruled in favor of same-sex marriage in Obergefell v. Hodges.

Straightforward, balanced, well-prepared

Barbara Rinto was president of Cincinnati’s Planned Parenthood from 1990 to 1998. Her husband, Jerry Lawson, served in the same role from 2012 to 2019. Gerhardstein and his colleagues represented the organization through those years.

Rinto and Lawson describe Gerhardstein with many of the same words: straightforward, balanced, well-prepared.

He kept Rinto calm when John Brockhoeft was released from prison in 1995. He had firebombed Cincinnati’s Planned Parenthood building a decade earlier.

“It was quite frightening, as you can imagine,” she said. “(Gerhardstein) was incredibly calm and so thorough, I just felt like we were in great hands.”

Iris Roley, the city’s consultant on the Collaborative Agreement, sees Gerhardstein’s work daily.

Most recently, the agreement he authored helped resolve what became known as the "water boys" incident. In June, police arrested boys selling bottled water on a corner in Roselawn. By early August, by bringing together all involved parties, the water boys became Brothers N Motion, whose members are now learning entrepreneur skills through a city program.

The collaborative agreement outlined the steps to resolution,  Roley said. “He wrote it. We’re putting it into action.”

Like other clients, Jill and Ron Plush, the parents of Kyle Plush, appreciated Gerhardstein's expertise and empathy as he crafted reforms for 911 service in Cincinnati. His efforts eased their pain as the city put protocols in place to prevent other families from experiencing a similar loss.

"He's not just representing us," Ron Plush said. He thinks Gerhardstein represented every citizen of Cincinnati.

Gerhardstein has an ability to bring people together to push, sometimes inch by inch, for change, his clients said.

It's not always easy to pull off. He's received angry letters and death threats, he told WCPO in 2015. The man convicted in the Planned Parenthood case was not a fan. Some advocates for gay rights did not initially like his strategy, Obergefell said. And when he represented inmates injured in Ohio's Lucasville prison uprising in 1993, inmates charged in those crimes thought he was on the wrong side, he said.

Right city, right neighborhood

Over eggs and hash browns at Hathway’s Diner in Carew Tower, Gerhardstein said Cincinnati was the right choice for his career.

“It’s a place where you can really get a handle on problems,” he said.

He thinks current city leaders are committed to problem-solving and open to input about big decisions, such as who should serve as city manager and police chief.

He and Gingold are also huge fans of Kennedy Heights, a diverse Cincinnati neighborhood where they bought a home in 1977, raised their family and jumped into local initiatives.

Gingold created a community run, organized block parties and created a tree board. Gerhardstein is a longtime member of a community development board. They both helped launched the Kennedy Heights Arts Center.

“We could not have raised our children and lived in a better place. It was incredibly soul-satisfying,” Gingold said.

Kennedy Heights was also an easy 10-mile bike ride to and from work for Gerhardstein, who also canoes and for a while ran marathons.

Time for a new generation

Gerhardstein has donated hundreds of his case files to the UC Archive and Rare Books Library. Some will be available soon. Some, like documents related to Lucasville work, will be sealed for a number of years.

He’s also turning some active cases over to colleagues “to bring the next generation along.”

He continues to monitor key settlements – in the Plush case in particular – to make sure agreed-on reforms go forward.

But he’s spending time in Minnesota too, currently consulting with a group there called Citizens United Against Police Brutality.

He’s also visiting Hawaii, as lead counsel on a case involving a homeless man jailed for another man’s crime, featured in a recent New York Times Magazine story.

He and Gingold call their slow exit from Cincinnati bittersweet.

In the end, St. Paul seemed like the next best place.

“We decided we didn’t want to live in a city that didn’t have any of our kids,” Gerhardstein said.

This article originally appeared on Cincinnati Enquirer: Al Gerhardstein, Cincinnati civil rights lawyer, is retiring. Sort of.