At Henriod Stern, lawyers who have spent their careers in trial and appellate courts handle every matter, with staff who know the courthouses as well as the lawyers do.
Admitted: Nevada; D. Nev.; Ninth Circuit
Fellow, American Academy of Appellate Lawyers · Board of Governors, State Bar of Nevada · Immediate Past President, Clark County Bar Association · Former Chair, Appellate Litigation Section · American Inns of Court
Best Lawyers “Lawyer of the Year,” Appellate Practice, Las Vegas 2023, 2025 · Super Lawyers Top 100 2016 · AV Preeminent
Named partner, one of Nevada’s largest plaintiffs’ trial firms · Office managing partner and appellate-group equity partner, Nevada’s largest firm · Began practice at a Las Vegas commercial firm
Vanderbilt University Law School, J.D. 2003 · University of Utah, B.A. Philosophy 2000
Joel Henriod has spent two decades in Nevada’s trial and appellate courts. He has led the legal work on more than seventy trial teams and been counsel in more than fifty published opinions of the Nevada Supreme Court and Court of Appeals, across nearly every subject in civil litigation: negligence, products liability, mass tort, medical malpractice, insurance bad faith, construction, real property, commercial contract, election law, taxation, eminent domain, and governmental regulation. He has briefed hundreds of appeals and argued many, including some of the state’s most consequential: Motor Coach Industries v. Khiabani, Adkins v. Union Pacific, Wyeth v. Rowatt, and Clark County School District v. Bryan. He has represented plaintiffs, defendants, and insurers alike.
At trial, Joel leads the legal side of the case: the trial briefs, the motions in limine, the evidentiary fights, the Rule 50 motions, and the jury instructions, along with strategy, jury selection, and witness preparation. He builds the record so the case is ready for appeal before the verdict comes in. Lawyers at other firms bring him in to do the same work on their cases.
Joel serves on the Board of Governors of the State Bar of Nevada and is the immediate past president of the Clark County Bar Association. The titles matter less than what they mean: after two decades in Nevada’s courts, the judges and justices of this state, and the lawyers on both sides of its cases, know him.
He is a co-editor of the Nevada Civil Practice Manual, for which he also wrote the chapters on appeals and post-judgment practice, and a co-author of the Nevada Appellate Practice Manual and of Preserving the Record in Appellate Practice in Federal and State Court. Before law school he volunteered in Romanian orphanages and translated for Operation Smile surgeons at Bucharest Children’s Hospital.
Joel spent sixteen years in the appellate group at Lewis Roca Rothgerber, where he was an equity partner and had the good fortune to practice alongside, and learn from, some of Nevada’s most accomplished appellate lawyers. In 2024 he was a named partner at Eglet Adams Eglet Ham Henriod, one of the largest plaintiffs’ trial firms in Nevada and a national name, before co-founding Henriod Stern in 2025 to practice on both sides.
Admitted: Nevada, California, New York, Arizona; D. Nev., C.D. Cal., N.D. Cal.; Fifth and Ninth Circuits
Managing partner, Las Vegas office of a national Am Law 200 firm · Partner, national law firm · Earlier practice at a Nevada firm · Began practice at an international Wall Street firm in New York
Yale Law School, J.D. 1999 · Carleton College, B.A. 1996
Ariel Stern has spent more than two decades in Nevada’s trial and appellate courts, trying nearly forty cases as first chair, jury and bench, in state and federal court. He has won jury verdicts for unpopular clients in difficult venues, had an opposing expert excluded mid-trial after voir dire, and tried the bench and jury cases on title and good-faith-purchaser questions that shaped Nevada’s HOA-foreclosure law. He has also led the evidentiary hearings on disputed expert testimony, fraud claims, and equitable remedies that decide many complex cases before a jury is seated.
For fifteen years before forming Henriod Stern, Ariel was managing partner of the Las Vegas office of Akerman LLP, where he led large-scale litigation in federal and state court and supervised hundreds of cases involving complex financial, real estate, and insurance disputes. After the Great Recession he led litigation strategy for one of the nation’s largest mortgage servicers, coordinating the defense of hundreds of individual cases, class actions, regulatory matters, and attorney-general investigations with aggregate exposure above a billion dollars. His early guidance on tender practice preserved his clients’ mortgage interests and produced the Nevada Supreme Court decisions that established both the effect of tender and when it is excused.
Ariel has argued more than twenty appeals in the Nevada Supreme Court, the Ninth Circuit, and the Ninth Circuit Bankruptcy Appellate Panel, and has been counsel of record in hundreds more. His practice spans commercial disputes, business torts, insurance coverage and bad faith, consumer protection, and bankruptcy and fraudulent-conveyance litigation. He began his career at Milbank LLP in New York in capital markets, banking, and project finance.
Senior Law Clerk, Chief Judge Michael P. Gibbons, Nevada Court of Appeals
Deputy Public Defender, Clark County · Associate, Am Law 200 firm
Admitted: Nevada, Oregon; D. Nev.; Ninth Circuit
Seven CALI Awards · James E. Rogers Outstanding Scholastic Achievement Award · Society of Advocates Trailblazer Award · Clark County Public Defender “Honey Badger” Award
UNLV William S. Boyd School of Law, J.D. 2022, summa cum laude, ranked 1 of 133 · UNLV, B.S. Nutrition Sciences 2019, magna cum laude · Brigham Young University, B.A. Political Science 2003
Jamie Leavitt graduated first in her class of 133 from UNLV’s William S. Boyd School of Law, then served as senior law clerk to Chief Judge Michael P. Gibbons of the Nevada Court of Appeals. She represents clients at every stage of litigation, from pre-suit strategy through trial and appeal, in Nevada’s state and federal courts.
She joined Henriod Stern from the Clark County Public Defender’s Office, where she carried a felony caseload from arraignment through trial and appeal and was a founding member of the Strategic Initiatives Committee, formed to litigate novel questions of Nevada criminal and constitutional law; the office’s “Honey Badger” award for tenacious advocacy is hers. Before that she practiced commercial litigation at Brownstein Hyatt Farber Schreck, handling contract, land-use, civil-rights, intellectual-property, and declaratory-judgment matters in arbitration, the Nevada courts, the District of Nevada, and the Ninth Circuit, and kept an active pro bono docket.
At Boyd she received the James E. Rogers Outstanding Scholastic Achievement Award and externed for Judges Andrew P. Gordon and Jennifer A. Dorsey of the District of Nevada; the Society of Advocates later gave her its Trailblazer Award. Law is her second career: a registered nutrition and dietetics technician with degrees from UNLV and Brigham Young University, she still lectures in UNLV’s nutrition program.
Jessica Helm runs the firm’s operations. A paralegal with a Master of Legal Studies (high honors), she is president-elect of the Las Vegas chapter of the Association of Legal Administrators and was the office administrator for the Las Vegas office of an Am Law 200 firm, after a decade in a high-volume litigation group. She knows the clerks’ offices in each of the courthouses across the street and the staff at the firms we work with and against, which is why clients and co-counsel tend to end up with her number as well as the partners’.
