Meredith M. Shaw

Meredith M. Shaw is a seasoned trial lawyer with extensive experience litigating a broad variety of complex commercial disputes in a host of state and federal courts and arbitration tribunals.  Ms. Shaw joined the firm’s New York office in 2010 and the firm’s San Francisco office in 2011; she returned to the firm’s New York office in 2018.  She maintains an active practice in both California and New York.

In recent years, Ms. Shaw’s practice has included representations in contract, fraud, antitrust, False Claims Act, products liability, trade libel, defamation, false advertising, breach of fiduciary duty, unfair competition, and other business tort actions for clients ranging from Fortune 500 companies to individuals.  Her clients’ businesses have ranged from consumer products to commercial real estate, tech to insurance, pharmaceuticals to online retail.

Recognized as a creative legal thinker and accomplished courtroom advocate, Ms. Shaw has achieved landmark success before both juries and judges.  In a case described by the Wall Street Journal as “major litigation over mortgage bonds that were at the heart of the financial crisis of 2008,” Ms. Shaw and her team, representing the plaintiff financial guaranty insurer, achieved a $1.84 billion settlement for their client following five weeks of trial in a residential mortgage-backed securities (RMBS) action in the Commercial Division of the New York Supreme Court.   

On the other side of the country, Ms. Shaw and her team achieved a complete victory for a developer against the City of Oakland in a bench trial in the United States District Court for the Northern District of California in a breach of contract (development agreement) action that warranted front page coverage in the San Francisco Chronicle.  In a ruling the Associated Press called “scathing,” the court found that the City’s record attacked by Ms. Shaw and her team at trial was “riddled with inaccuracies, major evidentiary gaps, erroneous assumptions, and faulty analyses, to the point that no reliable conclusion about health or safety dangers could be drawn from it.” 

Ms. Shaw has also served as trial counsel for a global consumer products company in cases venued across the country in which the plaintiffs allege that they developed cancer from using cosmetic talcum powder.  Ms. Shaw achieved complete defense victories before juries in each case that went to verdict.  Ms. Shaw also achieved unprecedented evidentiary preclusion rulings in these cases.  For example, following a multi-day evidentiary hearing in Philadelphia conducted by Ms. Shaw and one of her Quinn Emanuel partners—in a case The Legal Intelligencer called “likely the first of its kind in the Keystone State”—the court excluded the opinions and testimony of two of the plaintiff’s primary scientific experts.  Ms. Shaw then argued for and obtained summary judgment for her client in that same case on the eve of trial.