Sean Phillips Rodriguez

Sean practices primarily in complex commercial litigation, with particular emphasis on antitrust, intellectual property, technology, and finance.

He is currently litigating against Google in two consumer privacy class actions and is actively involved in representing multiple clients in connection with various state, national, and international investigations of Google’s anticompetitive tactics.

He was a leading member of the team representing a U.S. maker of solar panels in litigation with a major electric utility. The client won at every stage of the case, from the U.S. District Court to the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, reaching a settlement as the case was about to be argued before the U.S. Supreme Court.

Sean also successfully represented hundreds of thousands of workers in a wage-fixing class action that resulted in 2019 in one of the largest wage recoveries in years, and he is a regular speaker on class action issues.

As an associate, he represented American Express from the government’s pre-complaint investigation in 2009 through a two-month trial in 2015.

Sean clerked for Judge Mariana Pfaelzer in U.S. District Court for the Central District of California, whose docket at the time included several related high-profile securities matters arising from the mortgage crisis.

Before law school, Sean managed a microbiology laboratory and worked for a state agency on indigent defense.

Sean’s representative matters include:

• Representing a national distributed solar company in trial court and on appeal in a leading antitrust case against an incumbent utility
• Representing a major credit card network in connection with antitrust claims arising from the network’s contractual provisions with merchants; he was part of a team that defended the network in a seven-week bench trial against claims by the U.S. Department of Justice relating to those provisions
• Representing one of the world’s largest software companies in multiple cases asserting Computer Fraud and Abuse Act claims, copyright infringement, and related claims against a third-party service provider
• Representing clients in diverse industries in confidential data breach response matters
• Representing American Express in successful defense on appeal after the firm’s trial victory in a nationwide class action involving, among other claims, a claim under California's unfair competition law 
• Representing a former foreign government spokesperson in a case involving defamation and other tort claims
• Representing an individual in simultaneous federal white-collar criminal and state civil cases arising from the same transactions
• Representing the plaintiffs in the Perry v. Schwarzenegger challenge to California’s same-sex marriage ban