San Francisco
Victoria serves as bond counsel and disclosure counsel on a variety of public finance transactions, including general obligation financings, conduit bond financings, sales tax revenue financings, and lease revenue financings for public agencies. Her practice spans across industries, with a particular focus on local government and affordable housing financings.
In collaboration with Orrick's Strategic Advisory & Government Enforcement group, Victoria advises financial institutions and community development practitioners on Community Reinvestment Act and fair lending matters.
Before practicing law, Victoria worked in outreach and operations for Mercy Corps' Community Investment Trust, an innovative communal ownership model designed to help local residents of all income levels invest in commercial real estate.
Paris
Nicole has more than 20 years’ experience representing clients in international arbitration and all forms of dispute resolution. Dual trained in both civil and common law jurisdictions, Nicole has conducted arbitrations under all the main international arbitration rules including the ICC, AAA, SCC, UNCITRAL, ICDR and ICSID as well as local European arbitration institutions such as the Vienna Chamber (VIAC), CEPANI, Swiss Chamber and DIS. Her cases have spanned a variety of industries including oil and gas, nuclear energy, aviation, construction, technology, food and beverages, transportation, and insurance.
Nicole has worked on multi-billion dollar gas price review arbitrations for major European producers and several bet the company construction arbitrations, including an US$8 billion ICC arbitration for the world’s largest shipbuilder. She is frequently nominated to act as arbitrator and speaks and publishes regularly on questions of international commercial and investment arbitration, including The International Comparative Legal Guide to: Investor-State Arbitration 2019 – Country Questions and Answers: France. Nicole is a former member of the Executive Board and Global Boards of ICDR Y&I and practices in English, German, French and has a working knowledge of Spanish and Portuguese.
Prior to joining Orrick, Nicole practiced in one of the biggest law firms in the world in New York for six years, an Austrian firm in Vienna for five years and a major U.S. firm in Paris for seven years.
Seattle
Les is a Partner in the Public Finance practice group in Orrick’s Seattle office. He has served as bond counsel, disclosure counsel and underwriters’ counsel on public and privately placed tax-exempt and taxable debt issued by airports and ports, mass transit agencies, electric and water utilities, industrial development agencies and bond banks, higher education institutions and health care facilities. He has experience in advising clients in such financings in several states and U.S. territories, including Alaska, California, Guam, Nevada, New York, Oregon and Washington.
During the course of his practice, Les has worked on various types of financing structures, including standard general obligation and revenue bond financings, bond and grant anticipation financings, master trust indenture financings, conduit financings, pooled financings, variable rate bonds and current and advance refundings.
Prior to joining Orrick, Les was an associate in the Capital Markets practice group at Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft in New York, where he represented major foreign and domestic banks and boutique financial institutions as issuers, depositors, loan sellers, underwriters, initial purchasers and placement agents in connection with approximately $20 billion of public and private offerings of commercial mortgage-backed securities and collateralized loan obligations.
Houston
Ayshan Ibrahim focuses her practice on public finance matters with emphasis on tax-exempt bond financing and serves as counsel in various roles such as bond counsel, disclosure counsel, underwriter's counsel, lender's counsel, developer's counsel and borrower's counsel on an assortment of tax-exempt and taxable financing transactions. Ayshan has experience providing general counsel services for special districts in Colorado.
Los Angeles
Ramon has a wide range of experience in financings involving Native American tribes and tribal entities, including financings for new casino construction projects and casino expansions, and serving as lead counsel for some of the largest tribal financings on the West Coast.
San Francisco
Before his retirement as a partner, he was also the Partner-in-Charge of Lawyer Development for a number of years. While still practicing, he served at times as the firm’s General Counsel, Executive Director, Peer Review Committee Chair and member of the Partner Compensation Committee. He still acts as an advisor to the firm on matters affecting lawyer development.
Tom concentrated his practice in banking and commercial transactions. He represented banks and other financial institutions in a variety of transactions, including syndicated and single-lender credit agreements (both secured and unsecured), project financings, public finance transactions, and “synthetic” and other lease arrangements. As a lecturer and panelist, Tom frequently spoke at seminars on a range of topics related to his practice.
He served for several years as co-counsel of the International Bankers Association in California. He has been a member of the State Bar of California’s Business Law Section’s Financial Institutions Committee and Uniform Commercial Code Committee. In addition, he has been a member of the San Francisco Symphony’s Business Gifts Committee.
Before joining Orrick, Tom was Vice President and Counsel at California First Bank (now Union Bank of California) in San Francisco. He was a visiting attorney at Clifford-Turner (now Clifford Chance), Solicitors, in London.
Washington, D.C.
Washington, D.C.
Pariya represents issuers, sponsors, underwriters, servicers, and other market participants in connection with securitizations and asset-backed securities, in public and private offerings.
New York
Paris
Florent Lewkowicz intervient principalement en matière de droit des sociétés, de droit boursier et de fusions-acquisitions en France et à l’international. Il a développé une expertise particulière en matière de cession et d'acquisition d'entreprises innovantes à fort potentiel, mais également en matière transactionnelle et de droit des sociétés dans le cadre de restructurations financières complexes.
Florent est notamment intervenu sur des restructurations financières significatives (Solocal, Orpea, groupe Casino) et des opérations de sorties majeures, plus particulièrement franco-américaines (Getaround/Drivy, Glose/Medium, Lalilo/Renaissance Learning, Tempow/Google, Context/Integral Ad Science, Cajoo/Flink, Heap/ContentSquare).
Avant de rejoindre Orrick en novembre 2018, Florent a été collaborateur au sein d'un cabinet américain de renom.
Orange County
Mr. Wood's experience spans multiple industries, practice areas, and jurisdictions. Through his work, Mr. Wood has developed a strong sense of the importance of each client's unique industry and circumstances to the matters he undertakes, and he thoroughly enjoys each chance to learn about his clients and their work. Although Mr. Wood's focus is on trade secret misappropriation and business torts, he prizes variety in his practice and relishes the chance to take on new challenges in different areas of law.
Mr. Wood is known for developing a deep understanding of the facts and law in each case. In most of his cases, he serves as the point person for fact discovery, and through this experience he has created highly efficient and effective methods of identifying, tracking, organizing and synthesizing key facts in even the most complex matters. He excels at identifying patters and drawing meaning from large data sets, and his methods have led to breakthroughs in his cases on more than on occasion.
Mr. Wood's interest in efficiency extends beyond the specific matters he works on. Mr. Wood enjoys identifying tasks in his practice that can be automated and developing tools to do so. This redounds to his clients' benefit--in one case Mr. Wood's automation tool led to nearly a 50% reduction in the total time required for a given matter.
Beyond his paid work, Mr. Wood is also an active participant in pro bono activities and organizations. Mr. Wood serves as a member of the Board of Directors of the Public Law Center of Orange County, and previously served two terms as Co-Chair of the PLC Advocates. He also regularly takes on pro bono clients, primarily representing clients in removal proceedings before the immigration courts and the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals.
New York
Richard has substantial experience advising clients across a wide range of cases, with particular focus on matters involving novel or complex constitutional, statutory, administrative, or other public-law issues, appeals, and legal and strategic counseling. A former law clerk to U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor and to Judge A. Raymond Randolph on the D.C. Circuit, Richard served both as a Bristow Fellow in the U.S. Department of Justice’s Office of the Solicitor General and as an Attorney-Adviser in its Office of Legal Counsel. During that time, he regularly counseled federal government attorneys on appellate and legal strategy issues and provided written and oral advice to the White House, the Attorney General and other executive branch offices on a broad spectrum of constitutional, statutory, and regulatory questions. He also practiced as an appellate litigator in the New York office of Wilmer, Cutler & Pickering from 2001-03 and, more recently, as of counsel in the New York office of Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher. Before his appointment as Dean, he was a tenured professor at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law, where he was Vice Dean from 2015-16.
Richard teaches and writes in the areas of administrative law, criminal justice, and corporations. His published work has appeared in the Yale Law Journal, the Michigan Law Review, the Virginia Law Review, the University of Pennsylvania Law Review, the Northwestern University Law Review, the Georgetown Law Journal, and the University of Minnesota Law Review, among other journals. He twice—in 2013 and 2015—received the Best Professor Award from Cardozo’s graduating class. He has been quoted on legal developments by The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, CNN, ABC News, Slate, and other media.
New York
In recognition of Peter’s career trial work, he was inducted into the American College of Trial Lawyers in 2015. Juries have compared him favorably to Johnnie Cochran and F. Lee Bailey. Clients laud Peter, telling Chambers USA 2020-2022, “He’s a standout trial lawyer and an outstanding advocate overall. He appreciates the client’s needs and advocates for them everywhere.” Another client notes, “He is brilliant in the courtroom under the most intense pressure,” “a master of seeing the full chessboard.” That praise is echoed by sources saying, Peter is “one of these lawyers that really turns big cases; he’s a real trial lawyer,” and calling him “one of the most gifted trial lawyers that I have ever seen.” Clients go on to applaud his trial experience and strategic approach saying, “Peter really knows his way round a courtroom. He's a great trial tactician.” “He is an outstanding advocate who appreciates the client's needs and reputational questions involved.” A peer in the trial bar told Law360, “What is most impressive is his ability as a true Field General – calmly directing his team’s efforts.”
With precedent-setting trial wins in intellectual property, commercial and products liability litigation, Peter has amassed honors from annual top rankings in Chambers USA, Legal 500, and Benchmark Litigation, to awards for excellence, such as New York “Litigation Star,” “Law360 MVP,” “Litigator of the Week,” and “Top 100 Trial Lawyers in America.”
It is Peter’s versatility that sets him apart. He brings a combination of deft courtroom skills, strategic acuity and team leadership. In July 2023, a leading company in the biotech agricultural space, Corteva Agriscience, retained Peter as lead trial counsel in a high profile intellectual property lawsuit Corteva filed against Inari Agriculture, Inc. and Inari Agriculture NV to protect its highly valuable patent protected genetically modified seeds. As noted in the complaint, the lawsuit "…seeks to prevent Inari from continuing its brazen efforts to steal Corteva's groundbreaking work." Specifically, the lawsuit alleges that Inari deliberately used a third-party agent to obtain protected Corteva seeds, illegally exported the seeds out of the United States, made slight genetic modifications of the biotech traits and is seeking U.S. patents for those modified traits. The case is pending in the U.S. District Court, Delaware and is in discovery. In May 2022, when faced with a headlining trial over control of the leading international model and talent company, Elite Worldwide Group, the company and its Chairman tapped Peter as lead trial counsel to parachute in just 45 days before trial. Our complete trial win for the client earned Peter and the team Litigators of the Week Runner-Up honors from the American Lawyer. Louis Dreyfus Company turned to Peter recently as lead trial counsel once they saw that a massive, high stakes trial was on the horizon with over $1 billion at stake amid class action claims alleging manipulation of the cotton futures market. DISH Network brought Peter in shortly before trial when the FTC and various state attorneys general sought $700 billion in damages and penalties for alleged telemarketing violations. He achieved an astounding trial victory for DISH limiting recovery to less than one percent of the exposure. For Johnson & Johnson, Peter has been part of a small group of market-leading outside counsel overseeing the defense of more than 15,000 talc-related cases, including product liability trials, consumer class actions, and cases brought under California’s Prop 65; handling multiple trials, SEC, DOJ, and AG investigations; and representing senior executives in major depositions, at trial, and before Congress.
Peter served as co-head of the firm's Global Litigation practice and is a former member of Orrick’s Board and Management Committee. Before joining Orrick, Peter was a partner at Donovan Leisure. He captained his college tennis team to a national ranking, has successfully competed in major national sailboat competitions, and serves on the Board of the Harlem Junior Tennis and Education Program. With his wife Linda, he has three children: Avery, Isabelle and Phoebe.