Delbert Gee

Delbert Gee is a retired Alameda County Superior Court Judge who served from 2002 to 2022, presiding over both civil and criminal cases.¹²

He began his legal career in 1980 as a Deputy District Attorney in Ventura County where he tried 33 jury trials to verdict. Gee was a civil litigator for the following 20 years in San Francisco.¹²

Gee was as a member of the Law Review; receiving his undergraduate degree from the University of California Davis and his law degree from Santa Clara University School of Law. Gee was a first generation college student.¹²

Gee was a congressional intern in Washington, D.C. for representative Pete Stark during the Bicentennial summer of 1976, and was co-chair of the campus Media Board at University of California, Davis, where he graduated with a bachelor of arts degree in political science in 1977.¹

He then attended Santa Clara University School of Law where he was an associate editor of the Santa Clara Law Review.³ Gee clerked for attorney Donald B. Ayer in the criminal division of the office of the United States Attorney for the Northern District of California in San Jose, California.⁴ Gee graduated from law school in December 1979.⁵

Gee became a member of the State Bar of California⁶ in May 1980 and began his legal career as a Deputy District Attorney in Ventura County where he tried 33 jury trials to verdict as the county's first Asian-Pacific Islander American prosecutor.⁷²

He then spent the next 20 years in San Francisco as a civil litigator, first as an associate attorney with Hassard, Bonnington, Rogers & Huber and then with Bronson, Bronson & McKinnon, and later as a partner with Sturgeon, Keller, Phillips, Gee & O'Leary PC and then as a founding partner of the Pacific West Law Group LLP.⁸²

He specialized in the fields of health and liability insurance bad faith litigation, medical malpractice litigation,⁹ and health care law.²¹¹⁰

Gee was appointed to the bench in 2002 by Gray Davis, at the time the Governor of the State of California. Gee served as a judge of the Superior Court of California (US) for the County of Alameda, and presided over both a civil direct calendar and a criminal felony and misdemeanor calendar and trial court.¹¹¹²

He also presided over a probate, conservatorship, and guardianship court, collaborative and drug courts, and a juvenile dependency and delinquency court.¹²²

He was the last judge to preside over criminal cases in the Alameda courthouse, and he presided over two civil jury trials conducted entirely by video during the COVID-19 pandemic.¹³ He was a member of the court's executive committee, and was the supervising judge of the court's probate division and of the Alameda courthouse.¹²²

In 2002, he was honored by the Asian American Bar Association of the Greater Bay Area,¹⁴ and was presented in 2010 with the Judicial Distinguished Service Award by the Alameda County Bar Association¹⁵ and a resolution in his honor by the California State Assembly.¹⁶

Gee's parents immigrated to California, where he attended Livermore High School in Alameda County California. Gee was a first generation college student.¹⁷

He has been active for decades in numerous professional, civic, and service organizations² in the San Francisco Bay Area,¹⁸ and continues to be a sustaining member of the Asian American Bar Association of the Greater Bay Area (AABA) where he founded the AABA Judges Scholarship.¹⁹