Practice areas
What we litigate
Four practice areas, deliberately. We turn down matters outside this list on the first call, and we will tell you who in the city to call instead.
One of four
Commercial Litigation
Contract disputes, partnership dissolutions, fraud and fiduciary-duty claims, and the post-closing fights that follow private-company transactions. We handle plaintiff and defense work in roughly equal measure, in state and federal court, and we have tried more than a hundred of these to verdict.
Representative matters: breach-of-contract trial for a regional distributor ($14M judgment, affirmed on appeal); buyout dispute between three founders of a logistics company; defense of a board chair in a derivative action.
Two of four
Employment Disputes
Non-compete enforcement and defense — including the Oregon and Washington statutory regimes that most out-of-state firms misread — wage-and-hour class and collective actions, whistleblower retaliation, and senior-executive separation work. We litigate on both sides of the v, but never in the same matter.
Representative matters: defense of a software company against a wage-and-hour class action (decertified at certification stage); enforcement of a non-compete against a departing CRO; retaliation trial for a healthcare-system whistleblower.
Three of four
IP & Trade Secrets
Trade-secret misappropriation under the federal DTSA and the Oregon and Washington Uniform Trade Secrets Acts, departed-employee matters, source-code escrow disputes, and the temporary-restraining-order practice that lives or dies in the first seventy-two hours. We do not do patent prosecution; we do litigate patent and copyright disputes when they are paired with a trade-secret claim.
Representative matters: TRO and preliminary injunction obtained against three departed engineers; defense of an acquihired team against the acquirer’s later misappropriation claim; coordinated multi-state action involving customer-list theft.
Four of four
Corporate Counsel
Outside general counsel for companies under fifty employees: governance, commercial contracts, equity grants, vendor and customer disputes that have not yet become litigation. Our corporate work exists primarily to make our litigation work unnecessary for the same clients; when it fails to, the same team is there.
Representative engagements: outside GC for two Series A SaaS companies and a regional food-and-beverage holding; founder-buyout work; on-call employment compliance for a thirty-person engineering team.
Next step
Send us the matter summary.
A partner reads every inquiry. If we are conflicted, or it is not our work, we will tell you that day and name someone who does it.