Practice areas
What we litigate
Four practice areas, deliberately. We turn down matters outside this list on the first call; 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 + 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.
