Who is Anh Phoong? Sacramento’s celebrity lawyer opens up about life behind her billboard
Close to 900 people milled around the geometric patterned carpet of the Apex at Red Hawk Casino in Shingle Springs on Friday the 13th, hoping to get a selfie with the woman of the hour. Anh Phoong — lawyer, mother, boss, and billboard celebrity — sported a red festive top and, adorned in a matching nutcracker hat, greeted guests with warm hugs and doled out drink tickets like Oprah Winfrey: you get a drink ticket, you get a drink ticket, and you get a drink ticket, too.
Phoong, 43, lives her life by a simple yet powerful ethical code: Go all in. The Phoong Law Center annual holiday festivities were an abundant manifestation of that motto. It was as much family friendly, with go-karts, Build-a-Bear workshops and face painting, as it was camp extravagance, with a Michael Jackson impersonator, Chinese lion dancing, a mariachi band and approximately one metric ton of shrimp cocktail.
Party favors aside, Phoong was who employees, friends, family, extended family, and some rather high Sacramento political players came to see last Friday. And despite the hundreds of attendees vying for a hug, a hello and of course, a selfie, Phoong greeted each one as if they were the person she’d been waiting for the entire time.
“I didn’t even get to sit down,” she said a few days later at her office on leafy Riverside Boulevard. She didn’t get to eat, either, despite a buffet replete with the aforementioned shrimp, Korean beef ribs, platters of salmon, fajitas, and more.
“I wasn’t even hungry,” she said. “There were so many people I was so excited to see.”
Some of those people included California State Treasurer and Lt. Governor hopeful Fiona Ma, who mingled with guests at the bar as Sacramento County District Attorney Thien Ho chatted with friends at a table nearby. Sacramento Mayor Kevin McCarty arrived around 9 p.m. with Assemblymember Stephanie Nguyen, taking photos with Santa and dining with Ho.
Phoong’s husband Anthony Salcedo, Phoong Law Center’s general manager, wore a white tee that read “ANH PHOONG IS MY LAWYER,” and was everywhere all at once, greeting and entertaining guests. Her extended family, many of whom are part of the Vietnamese and Chinese communities in Sacramento and its surrounding areas, enjoyed the festivities as well.
Friends from college showed up, as did Phoong’s would-be rivals in the business of personal injury. Moseley Collins (of “444-4444” and “InGodsLove.com” fame) brought his entire family, including a newborn grandchild. Ashley Amerino (“In A Crash? Call Ash!) and Jelena Tiemann, of Tiemann Law (whose billboards boast her record-setting $66 million settlement), attended, too.
“I mean, they’re at my party, so we’re good,” Phoong said with a shrug. “I don’t feel like we’re in competition with each other. I don’t feel like I’m in competition with anybody.”
It was the party of the season, a veritable who’s-who of Sacramento’s most random corners of influence. Beneath all of the fanfare, it represented the unexpected reach of the self-described underdog, the People’s Princess of Sacramento, who turned rejection, failure, and her family’s own checkered past into billboard ubiquity, status, and ultimately, substantial community connection and influence.
“If you knew my whole story,” she said in the interview later, taking a serious tone. “I think it’d be hard for you not to give me a little bit of respect.”
Something wrong? Call Anh Phoong!
Before she knew she wanted to be a lawyer, Phoong took an interest in what she now recognizes to be an ironic subject: business and marketing – emphasis on marketing and commercials.
Phoong grew up in Antelope, and after graduating from Center High School with the class of ‘99, she enrolled at American River College. She later transferred to Sac State, where she pursued a Business and Marketing degree.
“It makes sense now, but I was so interested in commercials,” she said. A criminal justice class changed everything for the listless Phoong, who grew up loving “Law & Order.”She changed her major in her final year of college, crammed the new major into less than four semesters, and decided that she wanted to pursue a Juris Doctorate after graduating with her B.A. in 2005.
The years she spent between Sac State and Lincoln Law School were not, sheadmitted, her most ambitious.
“I wasn’t trying my best,” she said. “I was still in that party stage in my life, let’s be real.”
Unsurprisingly, when she took her first LSAT test, she bombed.
The Dean of Lincoln Law School, a university known for admitting students with lower test scores, laughed in her face, she said. She begged him to admit her, and promised she would work harder than anyone. He told her to come back with a 25% increase in her LSAT score and he would reconsider.
She did, increasing her score by 27% — and later graduating as the Valedictorian of her class in 2011.
“I might not be the smartest,” she remembered telling him, “but I will be the hardest working.”
This is where her “go all in” mentality came from.
“I just knew how to give it my all. I was like, ’If I’m going to do this, I’m going to really do this.’”
Phoong had a straightforward goal: finish law school, pass the California Bar exam, and become a public defender at the Solano County Public Defender’s office. She worked 40 hours a week in the office as a law clerk, driving back and forth between Fairfield for work and Sacramento for classes.
But when she graduated, and passed the Bar in 2012, it wasn’t able to bring her on.
The Law Office of Anh Phoong was born shortly thereafter, with Phoong doing the bulk of the work, even intake calls. Phoong Law Corporation was formally established in 2013. A car accident her last year of law school helped nudge her in the direction of personal injury.
Her husband suggested they invest in some marketing for the firm, and a trip to Miami inspired Phoong to build a brand for herself.
“There’s this firm down there and from the airport, to the shuttle, to the hotel, on billboards, TV, you just heard their jingle everywhere. I thought, ‘Sacramento doesn’t really have that. Maybe we should do that.’”
Behind the billboard
Before becoming one of the most recognizable faces along the highways of Northern California — and now Los Angeles — and before throwing holiday parties at casinos and sponsoring the Sacramento Kings, Phoong was fighting a fight she’s never opened up about before: raising her daughter in the painful absence of her incarcerated husband.
Phoong met Salcedo, known among friends and family as TJ, at Lincoln Law School, where they were part of the same study group. They became best friends during their student years.
“We didn’t even date,” Phoong said. “We went straight to marriage.”
They struggled to conceive a much-wanted child, turning to IVF.
“I had three rounds of IVF in order to get pregnant, and it was really hard,” Phoong said. “It’s something that you think is natural, you know, becoming a mom. And it wasn’t happening. It was such an emotional process in and of itself.”
Three rounds of the fertility treatment resulted in Phoong’s first pregnancy, that of her daughter, Annie. But Salcedo was neither there for Annie’s birth, nor for the earliest years of her life.
“So we finally did conceive her,” Phoong said. “And then my husband was not around.”
Salcedo was convicted in 2015 in a mortgage fraud scheme, in which he defrauded several home buyers of hundreds of thousands of dollars. He was sentenced to five years in prison near Fresno, but was released in early 2019. Prosecutors with the U.S. Department of Justice at the time called him a “little hustler” of a real estate agent, and portrayed Salcedo to have “a lack of true acceptance of any responsibility.”
A federal jury found him guilty of one count of conspiracy and four counts of mail fraud for providing kickbacks to homebuyers and inflating the value of four properties in the Sacramento area.
Salcedo acknowledged that “it was greed.”
“But,” he told a probation officer, “it was because I wanted to go to law school.”
Salcedo graduated from Lincoln Law School but was never admitted to the California Bar.
Phoong has been hesitant to discuss this aspect of her family’s life, partially because it could compound the preexisting skepticism she already faces for being a personal injury attorney.
But now she’s ready to open up about it.
“I get a lot of people that look at me and see me in a negative light,” she said. “And some people think, ‘Oh, she’s just, she’s an ambulance chaser.’”
“I’m not going to duck and hide from it, because it is a part of the story,” she added. “If you really want to know the true Anh Phoong, you really have to know one of the hardest moments in my life ... Conceiving was already one issue, and being a single mom for several years, and then juggling a firm, continuing to build a law firm …There’s been a lot.”
The stigma affects her work, too. A recent case of hers went to trial and not one, but two potential jurors admitted they didn’t trust billboard attorneys.
“I don’t like billboard attorneys. I don’t respect them. I don’t think I can be fair, because it’s her,” one said.
“No disrespect to you,” said another. “I know I don’t know you personally, but I’m a truck driver, and when I see your TV ads, your billboards, I just, I’m not OK with it.”
“It really stung,” she said. “I’d be lying if I said it didn’t hurt.”
Despite the self-assured, arms-folded power pose now infamous on her billboards, Phoong also opened up about the cruelty she faces online for her appearance.
“There was so much negative comments about my looks and my braces, my mouth,” she said. Her social media account was filled with such comments as “That’s a donkey,” “That’s a horse,” and even, “I thought she was beautiful, but she’s not.”
“I don’t want to be seen for a whole year and a half,” she said of the braces. But true to form, she opted to be outspoken instead, and posted on Instagram about “embracing the braces” (another catchy slogan, she admitted).
“I’m at the point where that’s all I want — people who like me, and like who I am. And if I’m not your cup of tea, or if you think my past is colored and you don’t like my husband, move on to the next. There’s six other attorneys out there that advertise, and many that don’t advertise, that you can choose from. And I’m okay with that.”
‘Honored’ by support from LGBTQ community
For all of the criticism that Phoong has faced, adoration for her and her brand outweighs it all by a long shot.
Instagram accounts dedicated to her billboards earn comments such as “Always winning” and “you know it’s going to be a good day when Anh Phoong is spotted.” People dress up like her for Halloween. San Jose drag queen, Alpha Andromeda, performed an entire act in her likeness in a blue dress and black wig, singing along to Blondie’s “Call Me.”
“I was not offended,” Phoong said. “I’m flattered,” she told Alpha. “You’re beautiful.”
The two became friends.
As her brand — and presence in the Bay Area — grew, so did support from the LGBTQ community.
She recalls being “hesitant” when the Stud, a longstanding gay bar in San Francisco, asked her to be a guest of honor last May.
“We’ve got to, like, think about how it looks on the business,” she recalled. “An attorney going to a club? Am I gonna have respect?”
As she is wont to do, she let her heart lead the way.
“I’m gonna do what I want to do, and I want to go, and I want to support the community, and I don’t care what happens after,” she thought at the time.
She took to the stage in voluminous highlighted hair, a black corset, leather pants, and knee-high stiletto boots, to greet her fans — Alpha included.
“If people aren’t going to like me because (of this), I don’t care. It came down to the fact that it’s what my heart wanted to do. And if people have a problem with it, so be it. Join the line.”
She’s as surprised as anyone that her brand struck a chord in the queer community.
“I feel honored, because, I mean, they could choose anybody, right? And they chose me.”
Phoong gets political
As Phoong’s business grew, the lawyer became increasingly invested in community engagement and charity, wanting to give back to the communities that raised her; she’s currently working with her high school alma mater, Center High, to set up a scholarship or fund.
Through this work, she landed on the radar of some of Sacramento’s most powerful political players.
Assemblymember Nguyen, who was elected in 2022 to represent the Elk Grove area in the Legislature, has known Phoong for three years, and said that what you see with Phoong is what you get.
Nguyen, like the jurors Phoong heard from in her last case, had her skepticism about the woman behind the “catchy, but cheesy” billboard slogan.
They met for lunch, which was scheduled to last one hour — but lasted two-and-a-half instead.
“We both came from nothing,” Nguyen said. “I’ve watched her give thousands of dollars to organizations, I’ve watched her meet somebody and hear their story and send them a check immediately. She truly has that heart that wants to give back. I’ve met millionaires, billionaires, and I’ve not met anybody who does what she does.”
The two have developed a close friendship, as two prominent women in the Asian American and Pacific Islander community in Sacramento. But Phoong has never lost her sense of self. In 2023, Nguyen scored two tickets to the Grammy Awards, and brought Phoong as her plus-one. The two did not pack adequate attire for such an event. They went to Rodeo Drive, searching the designer stores for the right outfits, but both felt tremendously out of place.
“She goes, ‘We need a Ross!’” Nguyen recalled. And when they got there, Phoong felt far more at home.
“This is my kind of store,” Nguyen remembered her saying.
Later that year, Nguyen, a member of the AAPI Legislative Caucus, nominated Phoong for a commendation at the Capitol for AAPI Heritage Month.
Phoong teared up recalling the event, with her husband and daughter in tow.
Phoong, who is both Chinese and Vietnamese, grew up enjoying dim sum, and especially chicken feet.
“It does not sound appealing, but it’s just, you know, it’s what we do,” Phoong said. She raised her daughter, who is also Mexican and German from Salcedo’s side, to eat the same things she did.
“One of the things that was important for me was to make sure she understood the culture and where her parents came from.”
Her daughter loves chicken feet, but doesn’t want to eat it at school.
“It’s not like eating a peanut butter and jelly sandwich,” Phoong said. “And you know, the whole purpose of the speech was that I hope that she’s proud of herself, that one day she can eat chicken feet in public and be prideful and not be ashamed.”
Nguyen is not the only Sacramento politician Phoong is close to. Sacramento County District Attorney Thien Ho is “like a brother.”
Both have deep roots in the San Jose Vietnamese community — Phoong was born there, the first in her family born in the U.S., and Ho’s family moved there after they immigrated to California from Communist Vietnam.
Phoong said she respects his vision and ambition.
“If you know anything about him, you know he’s one of those people who’s not just about the talk.”
Phoong had never been involved in political campaigns before, but when she found out Ho was running for DA, she thought, “I need to support my brother.”
Phoong and Salcedo have given a collective $20,000 to his reelection campaign. She has shown support for other campaigns, including McCarty’s and state Sen. Christopher Cabaldon’s.
The lawyer is not unaware that much of her success — and the community connections forged by that success — comes from a slogan she almost said no to.
All the credit for that iconic slogan goes to her “little hustler” husband, the father of her three kids, and the manager of her firm, who helped come up with it before beginning his prison sentence.
“He’s the one that actually came up with ‘something wrong,’” she said. “He blurted it out, and I was like, ‘No, that’s corny, that’s cheesy … that’s perfect.’”
They decided to try it for a while, to see if it would stick.
“I guess it has.”
This story was originally published December 20, 2024 at 5:00 AM.
