Paul A. Reynolds

Partner

Location:
San Diego, California
Phone:
(619) 696-9500 (619) 225-7422
Fax:
(800) 868-9350
Email:
preynolds@shufirm.com

Areas of Practice

Paul Reynolds is a Partner based in the firm’s San Diego office. He has specialized, and practiced exclusively, in securities and complex business litigation for over 25 years.

ACCOLADES

  • He has been appointed as a Fellow of Litigation Counsel of America, an invitation only trial lawyers honor society with strictly limited membership whose members are vigorously vetted for skills, expertise, and service.  Fellows are selected based on excellence and accomplishment in litigation, both at the trial and appellate level.
  • He has been designated, under the specialty of Commercial Litigation, in The Best Lawyers in America, the U.S. News and World Report (formerly Woodward/White) publication, the peer-reviewed lawyer rating publication directed primarily at in-house corporate counsel.
  • He has, likewise, been awarded with the peer-reviewed Super Lawyers designation, awarded by Thomson Reuters, the country’s oldest and largest purveyor of legal texts and data, in the specialties of Securities Litigation and Business Litigation.
  • He is also rated “AV-Preeminent” by Martindale-Hubbell, the highest rating possible in both skill and ethics, bestowed by the country’s oldest peer-reviewed rating service of legal professionals.
  • He was recently interviewed by The Daily Journal, the newspaper of record for California’s legal profession, for an article naming Shustak Reynolds & Partners one of the top 20 boutique law firms in California. Read the Daily Journal article here.
  • He is a Past President and a member of the Board of Governors of the San Diego Chapter of the Association of Business Trial Lawyers, a state-wide organization that is perhaps the California’s preeminent bench-bar organization, which is devoted to the litigation and trial of complex business disputes. Through his active involvement with and, especially, leadership positions in, the ABTL, he interacts regularly with the most sophisticated lawyers (representing plaintiffs and defendants both) who practice in that space, as well as the state and federal trial and appellate judges who hear their clients’ disputes—not just in San Diego, but throughout California.

EXPERIENCE AND BACKGROUND

Paul has a state-wide and, indeed, national (particularly in Delaware and New York) practice, representing defendants and plaintiffs in state and federal trial and appellate courts and arbitration forums.

At the trial level, he has tried and arbitrated complex securities and businesses cases to verdict or award in judicial and arbitral forums throughout the country, including multiples matters with amounts in controversy reaching into nine figures (among them before the Delaware Court of Chancery), and achieved numerous trial and arbitration victories, as well as complete victories short of trial via motion practice and successful settlements in countless matters.

At the appellate level, he has successfully briefed and argued these same types of cases—including the California Supreme Court’s seminal case on shareholder derivative standing, Grossett v. Wenaas, 42 Cal. 4th 1100 (2008), where he was the primary author of the prevailing parties’ briefs, and Swortwood v. Tenedora de Empresas, S.A. de C.V., 2014 WL 1664480 (9th Cir. April 28, 2014), where he obtained a reversal of a preliminary injunction from the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in an expedited interlocutory appeal on an important issue of first impression of Delaware law regarding the rights and obligations of majority shareholders as they relate to preferences afforded holders of preferred shares.  (For more details, please see the “Biography” tab.)

Paul was previously a partner at DLA Piper, one of the world’s largest law firms, and its predecessor, Gray Cary Ware & Freidenrich, which was San Diego’s oldest and largest law firm; there, he was mentored for years by some of the city’s most admired lawyers, several of whom went on to become federal or state court judges.

SPECIALIZATION AND PRACTICE

Paul has, particularly, an exceptionally deep and integrated knowledge of the federal and state securities laws and regulations and accompanying case law, and, equally, the Delaware (and also California and Nevada) law and case law regarding the proper governance and operation of corporations and limited liability companies and the duties of corporate fiduciaries. He limits his practice to the following sub-specialties, on behalf of defendants and plaintiffs alike:

  • Securities litigation, including federal and state (particularly California) securities fraud class and individual actions, shareholder derivative and direct actions under state law (particularly Delaware), fiduciary duty claims, majority/minority shareholder disputes, and FINRA arbitration proceedings arising out the purchase or sale of securities;
  • Venture capital disputes, including involving disputes with company founders, arising out of the various corporate documents and agreements that are typically entered into through multiple rounds of V.C. investments and the body of Delaware fiduciary duty and contract law that bears on the legal issues that arise out of these documents and relationships; this includes trial work in the Delaware Court of Chancery;
  • Corporate governance and operational and control issues advice, investigations, and litigation involving publicly traded and privately held corporations and limited liability companies, including representation of boards of directors, and their committees (such as Demand Review Committees, and Special Litigation Committees in responding to shareholder demands and actions);
  • Defense of SEC and FINRA investigations, compliance proceedings, and litigation;
  • Complex business litigation, including corporate and partnership control disputes, contract disputes, business torts, anti-SLAPP proceedings, civil RICO litigation, fraudulent transfers, claims involving franchise laws, and claims involving insurance and insurance brokers;
  • Consumer class actions, including under California Business and Professions Code section 17200;
  • Intellectual property litigation involving trade secrets and trademarks, including injunctive relief proceedings.

TECHNOLOGY/DATA FOCUS

From the very beginning of his career, Paul has been especially interested in leveraging technology to manage, analyze, and present most efficiently and effectively the vast amounts of data and evidence that are involved in large-scale corporate litigation—and has written on and presented to his peers on these topics. These technologies range from cloud-based document databases for review, searching, and coding of documents, emails, texts, and other evidence (often using relatively inexpensive outsourced teams of contract lawyers to both contain costs and scale manpower to immediate needs); specialized litigation chronology software; trial presentation tools; sophisticated graphics and demonstratives that can condense and deliver vast amounts of data in a way that is immediately and powerfully understood by the trier of fact; and carefully edited video deposition testimony from important witnesses who cannot be hauled into court to testify in person or to impeach trial witnesses on cross-examination. He is also extremely knowledgeable and experienced in gathering and preserving electronic evidence from clients and adversaries alike, as well as the litigation of sanctions proceedings where alleged non-compliance with parties’ obligations in this regard is an issue—a critical core competency in modern litigation.

PRAGMATIC PRACTICE PHILOSOPHY

Paul employs a rigorously analytical and, above all else, pragmatic view to everything he does, or does not do, in service of the particular matter at hand and the client’s interests in that matter.

There is—never—a one-size-fits-all “checklist” applied; every case and every client are unique, and approached with that reality in mind. Advice is provided in this spirit and ethos and with a sense of realpolitik—looking at things as they are, not as one may wish they were. The big picture, the costs and benefits, the upsides and the downsides (including economic and risk considerations), must always be considered.

Ultimately, litigation is a dispute resolution process. Cases should only be litigated or, even, tried if there is no other option available that is superior. And this calculus must be dynamic, constantly reapplied and reanalyzed as the facts on the ground change. Part and parcel of this philosophy is to not be aggressive just for the sake of aggression itself—to fight just for the sake of fighting. Rather, the objective is to be intelligently, strategically aggressive; to pick one’s battles and only engage on those issues that actually move the ball forward toward the client’s ultimate objective. And to avoid the trap of letting emotion or stubbornness cause one to take untenable or unsellable positions—positions that will ultimately cause a loss of credibility.