It's hard to imagine a more diverse and interesting career for a trial lawyer than that of Paul Grewal. Paul began his career trying complex technology cases to juries, presided over more than 30 jury trials as a Federal Judge in the Northern District of California and then became a senior lawyer at Facebook and the cryptocurrency trading company, Coinbase. Our discussion with Paul covers all aspects of his incredible career, including his approach to trying cases, perspective from the bench and how these experiences helped form his approach to issues involving digital media and cryptocurrency.
We begin the episode discussing Paul's early career as a trial lawyer where he had to find ways to explain complex concepts, often involving technology, to ordinary jurors. Paul describes how he learned to do this, particularly with argument by analogies that were accessible to jurors.
We then move to discuss Paul's years as a Judge in the Northern District of California, where he presided over many civil jury trials. As a judge, Paul was in a good position to observe and comment on the quality of the lawyering. He saw what worked and what did not work in front of juries. He also developed views about how to improve civil jury trials to produce fairer and better results.
Following Paul's time on the bench, we became of the senior attorneys at Facebook, responsible for managing Facebook's litigation across the globe. Paul shares what he learned about digital media from that experience and provides his take on the current debate between first amendment open media and the role of social media platforms, like Facebook, in the dissemination of propaganda, conspiracy theory and false and misleading information.
Finally, we move on to discuss Paul's current position as general counsel at Coinbase, an online cryptocurrency trading platform. Paul explains the concept behind cryptocurrency and provides his thoughts on the future of this type of digital currency.
About Paul Grewal (Taken from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Grewal)
Paul Grewal (full name: Paul Singh Grewal) is currently Chief Legal Officer at Coinbase. Previously Grewal was Vice President and Deputy General Counsel at Facebook, and is also a former U.S. Magistrate Judge for the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California.
Grewal received his Bachelor of Science in Civil and Environmental Engineering in 1993 from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he was elected to Tau Beta Pi and Sigma Xi Grewal then obtained his Juris Doctor (J.D.) degree from the University of Chicago in 1996.
Upon graduation from law school, Grewal served as a judicial law clerk to the Honorable Sam H. Bell of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Ohio. After his clerkship, he joined the law firm of Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman LLP (then known as Pillsbury, Madison & Sutro LLP), primarily practicing complex commercial litigation. After working at Pillsbury, Grewal then served as a judicial law clerk to the Honorable Arthur Gajarsa of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit.
After his clerkship with Judge Gajarsa, Grewal joined the law firm of Day Casebeer Madrid & Batchelder (which later merged with and became Howrey LLP, which he was a part of), where he became a partner and served on the firm's management committee, and where his practice focused on intellectual property litigation and patent litigation, with an emphasis on federal patent trials in district courts across the country and appellate work at a variety of federal appellate courts, including the Federal Circuit. In private practice, Grewal was also a registered patent attorney admitted to practice before the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office, and he performed re-examinations for his clients, which included independent inventors and companies in the high-technology, biotechnology, medical device, and financial firm/service spaces
Grewal was a former president of the South Asian Bar of Northern California and the Northern American South Asian Bar Association. In 2010, Grewal was named as a "Best Lawyer Under 40" by the National Asian Pacific American Bar Association (NAPABA).
On December 1, 2010, Grewal was sworn in as a U.S. Magistrate Judge for the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California. At that time, he was only the second sitting South Asian Federal Magistrate Judge in the United States. While a judge on that court, Grewal sat on the Northern District's Technology Practice and Patent Instructions and Rules Committees. Judge Grewal was also appointed by U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts to the Federal Judicial Center’s Magistrate Judge Education Committee and served as a co-chair of the Federal Circuit Bar Association’s Judges Committee.
On May 12, 2016, The Recorder reported that Judge Grewal would leave the bench in June 2016 to join Facebook as their Vice President and Deputy General Counsel. Judge Grewal retired from the bench on June 3, 2016.
He joined Facebook as the company's Vice President and Deputy General Counsel in June 2016.
On July 9, 2020, it was announced that Grewal would replace Brian Brooks as Chief Legal Officer at Coinbase, a cryptocurrency exchange.
About the Elawvate Podcast
The Elawvate Podcast – Where Trial Lawyers Learn, Share, and Grow is where the practice of trial law meets personal growth. To succeed as a trial lawyer and build a successful law firm requires practice skills, strategic thinking and some amount of business and entrepreneurial savvy. Elawvate is a place to learn and share skills and strategies for success.
But it is also a place to dig deeper and achieve personal growth.
Those who succeed as trial lawyers at the highest levels cultivate character, principle, integrity, leadership, courage, compassion and perseverance.
We learn and draw inspiration from those who have achieved this success.
For more about Elawvate, visit our website at www.elawvate.fm. You can also join our Facebook Group at Elawvate | Facebook
For more information or to contact the hosts, see:
(Ben Gideon | Gideon Asen LLC)
0 (0s): Today's episode of the elevate podcast is being brought to you by our friends at the expert Institute expert Institute is a company that assists trial lawyers and finding the right experts for your case. And in helping you prepare your case for settlement or for trial, the way they do that is in a number of services that they offer. One is that if you need an expert in a case, a specific expert from a particular specialty or geographic location, they will go out and perform a search for that expert and a unique search for every case, for each expert. 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It's a fantastic program to the point where I was meeting with one of my paralegals the other day, and she exclaimed Ben, the best decision you made since opening this new law firm was getting smart advocate. It's awesome. And it's really great to hear that from my staff and the people who have to do the really hard work of managing a volume of cases, intakes and discovery all the way up through trial. So we've had a great result with trial advocate. It's a very powerful and robust program. I know it's used by firms that do a multi-district litigation and class action, and literally have tens of thousands of clients all the way down to smaller PI firms can be customized for, for each particular application. 0 (3m 21s): In our case where we do a lot of medical malpractice cases and have very record and document intensive cases, it's also worked well for that. We can text and email our clients right through the interface. It automatically saves all of that correspondence so we can see what's what's happening. And it's really worked well for us. So I encourage you to contact smart advocate if you're looking for case management software and, and check it out. Our show today is also sponsored by our friends at hype legal hype. Legal is a full service digital marketing firm for trial lawyers, Micah and Tyler at hype legal had worked at high impact, which is a trial animation and graphics firm for a collective 20 plus years. 0 (4m 11s): So they're very familiar with trial lawyers and what we do. And now they're taking the skill set that they developed there in high-end graphics and aesthetics, and putting that to use for legal marketing. If you go to their website@hypelegal.com, you can check out a number of law firm websites and digital marketing campaigns that they've created, including the graphics and the website for our podcast, which is really terrific. So I encourage you to check out HYP legal. 1 (4m 42s): This is the elevate podcast where trial lawyers learn, share, and grow. Let's talk about how we can elevate our trial practices, law firms, and lives. And now here are your hosts coming to you from coast to coast trial lawyers, Ben Gideon, and Rahul Robbie Poodie. Rahul Ravipudi (5m 3s): This is raw whole Ravi Poodie and I'm Ben Gideon. Welcome to the elevate podcast. Ben, how are you doing okay? I'm doing great. Ben Gideon (5m 10s): Raul, as you know, I'm heading off to Hawaii on Saturday. So counting down the days and really excited for the trip. And then how many days are you going to be there just a week? You know, it's all, it's all for work, as you know, so I won't be having any fun. And I am dragging my whole family with me though, my wife and three children are coming. So they're, they're really excited about it. Although Maine is beautiful in the summer. It's, you know, this is like the time of year you want to be in Maine. So it's always a little hard to leave, but we're, we're excited for it. We're headed Rahul Ravipudi (5m 43s): To Spain tomorrow. Despite the Delta variant, we booked the flights before everything started to get a little bit more precarious. So fortunately my wife and kids were all vaccinated and, and hoping for an eventful trip, but not eventful because of the Corona virus. Ben, we've got Paul Gray wall here, and I know you're not heavily invested in cryptocurrencies, maybe not at all, but he's, you know, a federal district court judge turn Facebook, turn Coinbase, just watching his career trajectory is something that I only wish I could emulate, but it, the ship has already sailed for me on that, but I'm excited to meet you, Paul. Rahul Ravipudi (6m 23s): Hey, and be with you again, Paul. Good to see you. Thanks for joining us, Paul Grewal (6m 28s): Ben. It's great to meet you. I'm excited to do this. Thanks for having me on. Rahul Ravipudi (6m 32s): Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. I just touched upon it a little bit, but like usual in our podcast, I am by far the least qualified person to be on here. Ben Cornell and Yale, you MIT and university of Chicago, me Harvard of the west at UC Riverside. So, so I always love learning from amazing lawyers and people. Who've done such innovative things. And I'm really excited to learn a little bit about how you became who you are today. And one of the questions I had just to kind of tee it off, we talk a little bit about how it is to be a trial lawyer in the life of a trial lawyer before taking the bench. Rahul Ravipudi (7m 12s): You are that you are a trial lawyer trying cases all over the country. It was. So it, what about that? How did you get good at becoming a trial lawyer? And then my more important followup question is what skill sets translated into your subsequent careers? Paul Grewal (7m 30s): I will leave it to, to the jurors I appeared before and the judges as well to assess whether there's any, any good at it. But you know, when I was starting out as a, as a young associate in, in a major firm and a major practice, one of the things I tried to do in addition to my, my, my work in six minute increments, like everybody else was to really study some of the great trial lawyers I was working with and against, and try to figure out how did they become that good deconstructed and sort of start with the end product and work backwards from there. And, you know, that process shed light on, you know, a lot of classic skills that most of us understand, you know, makeup, the great trial lawyers, right? Paul Grewal (8m 17s): An incredible ability to be succinct in an incredible ability to take really complicated concepts and break them down into discrete elements that anyone not only could understand, but could get excited about. There's the great writing that I think often goes undersold and becoming a great trial lawyer given how important briefing is in any actual trial. So, you know, I did a lot of sort of self study of, of the masters around me to really understand what I needed to become and where I needed to aim for if I ever wanted to be anywhere near, you know, their class in terms of my MC capacity and in the courtroom. And, and then I went about it and I, and I, you know, aggressively went after every little opportunity I had to be on my feet, especially in a courtroom in front of a judge or a jury, even if I knew almost nothing or, or, or absolutely nothing about the subject matter, even if, you know, the, the, the partner I might be working for, or the client that we were both serving, might've been better off with somebody else. Paul Grewal (9m 19s): I just felt like it was that important to grab every opportunity I could and then hold myself accountable for, for meeting or exceeding the standards and expectations of the people who gave me that opportunity. And from there things, when things went forward, 0 (9m 31s): Can you just tell us a little bit more about that era? What were, what kind of firm were you working for and what kind of cases were you involved in trying? Paul Grewal (9m 38s): Yeah, so I came out of law school in the mid nineties and like a lot of like a lot of new lawyers interested in a litigation and trial law practice. I thought, what better way to, to get some insight into how that worked then to go clerk for a judge or two, which is what I ended up doing. And after, you know, clerking in federal district court and on the court of appeals, you know, I, I, I went into practice initially at a large law firm at the Pillsbury firm in San Francisco, but then I spent really the heart of my career in practice at a little boutique called day-case spear in Cupertino, California, that was formed by a number of former Cooley Goddard, senior partners who really wanted to strike out on their own and focus on this niche that in the mid nineties seemed kind of esoteric, which was prying technology cases to juries. Paul Grewal (10m 33s): And as it turned out, I happened to be in the right place at the right time, because at that point in the history of, of, of practice, you know, the, the technology trial really came into its own. And so I found myself working on some, some of the biggest cases of the day and the Microsoft antitrust litigation. My firm played some significant part in, in, in, in, in those cases did a lot of patents and other IP litigation work for big tech companies like Qualcomm and Symantec and Amgen. And so I really just found myself in the right place at the right time with not just a background that lent itself to that kind of work, but a real appetite for wanting to learn, how do you explain this complicated stuff to people who have no background? Paul Grewal (11m 19s): And is it an all too often have no real interest either and motivate them to understand what the right issue was, and then obviously your view or your client's view of the right solution to the problem presented. And so that's how I went about it. So Rahul Ravipudi (11m 34s): Without getting into too much granularity, what did you learn about how to communicate these very complex issues and maybe potentially uninteresting issues to a jury? Paul Grewal (11m 46s): Yeah, well, I mean, it's fascinating cause I used to find the design of a microprocessor or the you composition of a erythropoietin compound. Most jurors did not. And most judges did not. You know, what I, when I came to understand early on was that argument by analogy was critical that even if somebody couldn't be on a very superficial level, even understand the language or the concept you were speaking, if you could offer them an alternative framework, a model that allowed them to comfortably engage with the subject matter, you had a chance. And it wasn't just about persuading them of the righteousness of your argument or positional. Paul Grewal (12m 29s): That's obviously the end game. What I found in, in, in advocacy, especially in technology cases, was that that that branch you offered to the juror or judge by providing an analogy or an alternative framework was, was really an offer of generosity, right? It was, let me, let me meet you where you are. And let me not try to talk down to you. Let me try, try to show you how smart I am by using lots of fancy vocabulary. Let me actually give you the tools so that when you walk out of this process, whether it's a one hour hearing or a three month trial, you'll feel not only smarter and better about yourself as a result, but you'll feel proud of the service that you've done in helping these two or more parties get, get to a resolution of a problem. Paul Grewal (13m 15s): They couldn't solve themselves. That was the mindset that I had when I, when I approached it in it. And it served me well, not just as a, as a newer lawyer, but throughout my career, 0 (13m 24s): In those cases where you were, we had complex technology issues. Do you w what do you think drove juror decisions? Do you think that by the end of the case, I imagine some of those trials went on quite long, that they really did understand the science, or do you think that there were more accessible themes that kind of transcended that, that drove decision-making? Do you think they often would get it right in terms of the science? Paul Grewal (13m 52s): Yeah, so, so my perspective, Ben, on this was really forged in two parts of my career. You know, initially as a law clerk to a federal district judge doing a lot of trials, I got, I got a glimpse of how jury stopped because you know, you're sitting there and chambers every day, you're working on jury instructions with, with the district judge you're fetching donuts for the jury when, when nobody else thought to get them something to eat at a break and everything in between. And so through that process, you started to get familiar and frankly, comfortable just being around jurors, which was something that I really came to enjoy. And then as a, as a U S magistrate judge myself, I had the pleasure of trying a lot of cases with juries. Paul Grewal (14m 40s): And one of the privileges you have as a judge is after the trial is you can go into the jury room and literally ask them what was persuasive. Why did this witness seem to capture your attention when the other witnesses, not what five documents mattered to you in reaching your decision. And so that really gave me an informed view that I felt like, you know, I had been looking for, you know, throughout my career, up until that point. And among the lessons that I learned was that number one, very few jurors in technology intensive cases, like the kind I used to handle, truly understand the science beyond a superficial level. Paul Grewal (15m 23s): I think we are diluting ourselves and thinking that a one week or one month or even one year trial truly can educate people to, you know, through no fault of their own. They didn't volunteer for jury duty. Let's remember that, right? They are compelled to appear by force of the United States, marshals if necessary, but, but to embrace, you know, basic concepts and try to understand how things work. I think that, you know, what they really are trying to do is two things. One acquire enough of the fundamental concepts and vocabulary in order to have an intelligent conversation, not with you or with the experts, but among themselves about what was right and what was wrong. Paul Grewal (16m 5s): And then the other thing I really came to appreciate talking to jury after jury in, in these cases, was that the facts and the science that were, we were presenting either as trial lawyers or as a judge, in which case I was trying to master the ceremony of the presentations presented by others. These facts were being put into narratives that they were creating in order to assess essentially who was, who was in the right and who was in the wrong, how does the morality play that they are witnessing take place before them orient and organize all these disparate concepts in ways that resonate or in ways that can make them feel comfortable and confident that even if they can't explain the biology that's being debated in the courtroom, in a particular case, they can feel good that they reached the right decision. Paul Grewal (16m 54s): And that's really well as much as anything, what I learned from, from all those different experiences. So Rahul Ravipudi (17m 0s): As a sitting federal district court, judge, how many trials did you preside over? Paul Grewal (17m 6s): You know, I, I used to know this number by heart and any judge who says they, they can't tell you how many trials they've done jury trials, especially I would, I would question my old pals on the bench all used to keep score in some form or fashion. For me, I think I probably in five or so years on the district court, I tried something like 30, some cases to verdict jury verdict, and then a bunch of bench trials on top of that in Rahul Ravipudi (17m 31s): Watching that, whether it's bench trials or jury trials, was there a particular type of method of advocacy that you found to be effective for you as the trier of fact, or in observing the jurors? Paul Grewal (17m 44s): So I think that every trial lawyer, whether she's been doing it for a month or for 30 years has a unique style. And I'm speaking for myself early on, I felt obligated to try to mimic or copy the styles of these masters. I kept telling him, I mentioned to you earlier, right? That I used to study over and over again. And the real breakthrough moment for me. And I'm not even sure when this happened, when I realized that the style itself was less important, the authenticity of the style was what mattered, right? And so whether yours was a sweet and endearing style, whether yours is a more aggressive and authoritative style, whether your effect was joy, whether your effect is indignation, right? Paul Grewal (18m 32s): Whatever your approach to presenting your personality to the jury authenticity was everything. And I felt like as the judge watching the proceedings day in and day out, especially sitting literally on high, right? But also I could, I knew this from my conversations, the jury felt the same way you could tell who was playing a part in some, in some play, they construct into their head and who was truly just being themselves now, you know, presentation matters. And so we all tend to embellish certain elements of the presentation style, but you could tell who is being true to their form and who is, who is addressing the jury or the judge in a manner that was entirely consistent with how they would speak to a friend or a colleague or a neighbor. Paul Grewal (19m 18s): And that's really the, the attribute I've found to be the most critical for connection between trier and, and 0 (19m 26s): How important do you think the quality of the lawyering is to the outcome from your experience as, as a judge? We are, we like to think we have lots of control over that as, as lawyers, but we all know of anecdotes or experiences where you really out try the case against opposing counsel, or you watch a trial where one lawyer is clearly doing a much better job. They still don't prevail. So what, what was your experience with that? Paul Grewal (19m 55s): Yeah, one of the things that I learned over and over again was as between the best trial lawyer in the courtroom and the best set of facts, I'll take the best set of facts every time you just can't be good facts. You know, if you've got the defendant on tape confessing to, to selling the drugs and the dope is on the table in the, in the camera shot, I'm going to take that over, over a superior trial performance any day. But I, but I do think that great lawyering does matter. I don't want to suggest otherwise. And I think that where I saw it play out more than anything else was in the shot selection that every great trial layer has to undergo a thousand times in any court day, right? Paul Grewal (20m 37s): Not only what witnesses in what order talking about what subjects, but what documents and what portions of documents and what ordering of the, of points that a document might, might reveal is so critical to building a sense of confidence in the jury, or judge that as between these two very different explanations for what happened in a particular case, this is the side that, that, that feels most natural, that resonates most with how I would want to think about these facts if I were witnessing them myself in the first instance. And I think that's where the great lawyering comes in as in select and shot selection. I also think the great lawyers that I saw were just as careful about what issues to let go of as what issues to focus on. Paul Grewal (21m 24s): Right? So whether it was in a closing argument, whether it wasn't a cross-examination I saw so many instances of otherwise very solid performances go south by the lawyer trying to take on too much, too fast, too often. Right. And, and the great ones really could understand that even if they didn't get to 0.7, eight or nine, if they nailed points one, two, and three, they were done and they could comfortably and confidently rest at that point, that was something done and done, right. That I, I just never got tired of watching because it was really like seeing an artist perform at the highest level. So Rahul Ravipudi (22m 1s): How did your experience on the bench? Let me ask it a different way. I'm still trying to figure out that interview with Facebook. So you leave the bench and talk about an amazing landing that you had. I don't know if that was before you left the bench or right after, but what were the issues that you needed to talk to Facebook about where they said, we want this guy to be VP, deputy GC handling, basically all of our litigation around the world. Paul Grewal (22m 32s): Yeah, well, you know, I, I can't say for certain what was in anyone's mind at Facebook when they decided to talk to me, let alone hire me. But I, I can say that from my perspective, the things that ultimately proved to be most valuable for me in that role running global litigation were just the lessons I learned on the bench and the confidence I built that I could handle new issues and new new disputes, even if I hadn't had any experience with them. You know, as a, as a, as a, as a judge in federal district court, one of the luxuries that you have is that you are exposed to every kind of case involving every kind of party on any, on every, on every kind of day. Paul Grewal (23m 14s): And so, you know, you would bounce from eight to nine, to 10, to noon, to two, to three, and touch patents in one hour, civil rights issues, the next federal criminal law, after that, and then close it out with some securities cases or whatever, or products, liability issues. And so that comp that comfort and confidence addressing a wide portfolio of cases as it turned out, was like the perfect training for me to walk into Facebook in 2016 and suddenly find myself responsible for that company's entire global docket. The other thing I think that judging taught me more than anything else was how to connect, not just with other lawyers or other judges, but with other kinds of people on any given on any given day. Paul Grewal (24m 2s): You know, I would have the lions of the trial bar in my courtroom one moment. And the next moment I would be dealing with victims and family members in a, in a, in a federal criminal case, no one else would care about, I would talk to jurors. I would talk to federal agents who would come into my chambers, looking for search warrants. I would meet with pretrial services officers who would want to talk about a pro you know, a pretrial violation and the family circumstances of the defendant that might've been relevant to assessing their danger, the community, or the risk of flight. So you, you were exposed to a huge mix of legal topics. Yes. But you were also exposed to a huge mix of people. And, you know, I don't want to speak for Facebook, but I would think that for a platform serving now several billion people around the world, having some experience dealing with that range of personality, people type as well as legal type was of some value. Paul Grewal (24m 59s): And so, you know, it turned out, it turned out to be pretty helpful training as it were. 0 (25m 5s): Obviously Facebook has been in the news a lot recently because of the claims that it facilitates spreading of misinformation and propaganda surrounding the coronavirus and other things that seems like it would go part and parcel with any platform where you've got millions and millions of people communicating in a, you know, an open fashion. But I just curious what your thoughts are about where we're heading with all that. I mean, we're looking at more government regulation of that kind of digital medium, or is it going to somehow self-regulate and you know, what are the implications of kind of where we're heading with all that? 0 (25m 48s): Well, Paul Grewal (25m 49s): I think the, the opportunity for self-regulation has long since passed, you know, Ben, I, I joined Facebook in the summer of 2016 and it seems like ancient history, at least to me. But if you think back on that moment for just a second, it was really the last, the last days in which social media and big tech in general could do no wrong. Right? The, the issue with the debates we were having was is, is, is, is Facebook and, and other companies in tech merely a force for good or a force for great, you know, there was just nothing that the company could do that was wrong in the eyes of an adoring public, and, and policy makers and government officials were at the front of that line, you know, singing Facebook's praises. Paul Grewal (26m 34s): I had about eight weeks of that and the fall election hit in 2016 and all the allegations and concerns, Russian activity on the platform quickly and golf the company, you know, shortly after that, you know, it was Cambridge Analytica and all, all of the issues regarding user privacy that, you know, swarmed over that company and continued to dog it, I think to this day and everything else that you've read in the newspaper. So I really got to sort of see how on a dime that very, you know, positive can't do any can't do wrong. Reputation can turn, even as, you know, Facebook had issues going back to the earliest days of the company, but, but that was really an experience unlike anything else I had ever been a part of. Paul Grewal (27m 24s): And so do I think that, you know, there's more regulation coming? Absolutely. I think you just have to sort of study what Congress is up to with the president and, and, and his economic working group recently announced to see, and to consider the recent appointments and key positions in the, in the government over the last six months to see that there's a very different attitude towards tech today. And yeah, a lot of that frankly, is, is deserved. There's no question in my mind that, that the many social media companies, not just Facebook made a lot of really poor decisions about how products should be designed, how to disclose and be transparent with users about how their privacy would be managed. Paul Grewal (28m 4s): All of that. There were just some dumb decisions that were made. And so it's not surprising to me that regulators and policy makers would say, you know what, maybe wait, it may be way past due, but we're going to do something about this now, you know, I'm still hopeful that we'll, we'll, we'll we'll strike the right balance because I remain convinced even if it's not a popular position that these companies have overwhelmingly been a force for good in the world, even if they've made some really terrible decisions that have heard a lot of people in very real ways. And so, you know, I think this is where we have to have faith that our democracy we're sorted all out. Even if many of us don't have a lot of faith in our democratic institutions in the way that we did maybe a decade or two decades or three decades ago, 0 (28m 48s): Just sorry, if you want to jump place, just because you have this very unique experience going from being a, an advocate in a courtroom and trusting a process that depends on people coming in with open minds to make decisions about important matters to working for a company that has enormous influence over the very minds of those same people that someday we'll be sitting in a courtroom. And that's something we struggle with as trial lawyers, because it's no longer the case that people show up in a courtroom. Maybe it never has been really without lots of preconditioning on almost all of the important issues that we make. So how do you, how do you have a system that was designed no, under the old British common law and imported here, you know, a couple of hundred years ago when we didn't have this kind of digital media ubiquitous propaganda or communication, and to use a non-Maori loaded term, how do you fit that into our old jury model and make that actually work Paul Grewal (29m 51s): Well? It's funny, right? So like the, the most, the most ancient and common depiction of lady justice, right, is wearing a blindfold. And, and I think that, you know, we've always romanticized this notion of pure, pristine jurors and judges coming unadulterated to a set of facts and applying in a well-defined standards to a given record to reach a fair and just outcome. Now, I think history is super important. I think if you go back and read common sense by Tom and pat Thomas Paine, if you go back and read the Federalist papers, if you go back and if you want to go back even further and read Blackstone, right? Like there was never a time in which society was not at each other's throats in some form or fashion in, in, in, in the public square. Paul Grewal (30m 36s): And so that continued for 200 plus years when I was a kid. And, and as I became an adult and the most common medium for this type of exchange was talk radio and then cable news. And so, you know, now we have come to the present day in which you have even more powerful technologies supporting this type of vitriol, you know, among, among our citizenry and, and forming impressions of parties and issues. Well, before, you know, they get presented in a, in a court of law. I totally accept that the power of these new technologies dwarfs, you know, the broadsheets of 1790 or whatever. But I do think that our system still holds and still works. Paul Grewal (31m 21s): And I am somebody who has sat on both sides of that bar. I've now, I'm now client and have been a client in that same set of proceedings. And I continue to believe that even if, you know, in any given case, there's a risk of injustice by and large, our system still works in large part because I believe in the jury system, I believe that when people take an oath to serve as jurors to take that oath seriously, I just, I can count on one hand, the number of times in, in paneling over 30 some juries that a juror seemed to be casual or cavalier about what we were asking them to take on as a responsibility over and over again. I used to see billionaires because I sat in the courthouse in Silicon valley, we had a number of them sitting next to bus drivers who might've, you know, not had more than $20 to their name, working together to solve another citizens or set of citizens problems. Paul Grewal (32m 17s): And that's, that's what juries are there to do. Right? And, and I got inspired by that and, you know, I've lost cases in the courtroom and that has frustrated me. And I've had to explain to my clients why we lost and why they were going to have to do something they didn't want to do, but that never dimmed or diminished my faith, that people take their responsibility seriously. Now, on the point on the issue of, or, or topic of how do we adjust to this onslaught of information that jurors are exposed to even before, in some cases during, you know, there's their jury service. I think that we have to be realistic about that and accept that they are, they are, they are being hit and bombarded with messages that may be contrary to this idealistic notion of, of justice as being blind. Paul Grewal (33m 1s): What I, what I think we should not do is attempt to, you know, attempt to turn back the clock in some ways, or look only for those jurors who, who are, who are truly pristine. And according to some definition, because I don't think they exist, but I don't think that that's a problem because I think that even, even those people who have been exposed to ideas or issues can render a neutral and just outcome, if we give them the tools to do that, and we can talk about some ideas for that, that I have, but I think it's really important to appreciate how hard jurors generally work to Rahul Ravipudi (33m 37s): Get it right. Well, I want to hear your ideas on tools to do exactly that piqued my interest. Yeah. Well, let me Paul Grewal (33m 44s): Only offer a couple of Raul. One is, and this is, this is not original to me. I, you know, I don't claim any credit for this, but let's start with wired ear. Okay. And at least in my part of the world and my part of California, it has traditionally been the case that the judge handles 90 plus percent of the board year. And I think that is the emerging trend. Even in those parts of the country, they had a very different approach. Traditionally, I never understood that. I never understood why the trial lawyers were not largely responsible. And in charge of that process with the judge, keeping the guardrails in place, making sure nobody went out, you know, when, when, when completely haywire out of hand. Paul Grewal (34m 27s): And the reason why I just, I felt so strongly that the trial lawyers needed to have a significant, not just a role, but a significant role in for Deere is it's less about ferreting out who might be biased and who might, I think judges are more than capable of that by and large, if they take their responsibility seriously, but the incentives to work really hard to dig and scratch and clot. The one fact that might matter to that are just so much stronger for the trial or than they are for the judge, right? Like, yes, as the trial lawyer, you care very much about winning it's everything. That's why you're there. Your client did not hire you to play a part in some neutral system of justice, they hired you to win, right? Paul Grewal (35m 11s): So I just felt like the trial lawyers were just much more structurally motivated to get, get at the facts that mattered in assessing bias. So I could talk much more about Bordier, but that's a big one to me in trial practice that doesn't get as much attention as I think it deserves another, another reform that I was a big fan of as a judge that, you know, has taken some hold, but not enough in my view, in, in courtrooms all over the place, why don't get more of an opportunity to ask questions. You know, I used to give juries my juries, the opportunity at the end of each witness examination to submit proposed questions of their own so that if they were trying to figure out what a or B or C meant, they have a chance to, to ask it as opposed to waiting for another three months or three weeks until deliberations and hoping that they remembered that question or that another juror could answer it for them. Paul Grewal (36m 1s): That just seemed crazy to me. And so I would have juries propose questions, and I, as a judge, I would screen them to make sure there wasn't something crazy being introduced, but it was a remarkable seat. It led to a remarkable sea change, not only in the quality of the examinations and their utility for the trier, which is what the, you know, these direction crosses. Aren't there for, for you as the trial lawyer, for me as the judge, they're there for the jury, right. And if it doesn't serve the jury's purposes, what are we doing? So that was another thing that mattered. I found really, really powerful. When 0 (36m 31s): You allowed that were jurors, did they tend to be active and participating in that? What kind of questions did you get and did, were there questions that sometimes might have caused problems for you as a judge with them? Well, Paul Grewal (36m 46s): W can I tell, can I say Ben that every jury or every juror, or took advantage of that opportunity and really, no, that would be disingenuous. There were some jurors who were going to check out no matter what, but in almost every case, I can remember. There were other jurors who took that opportunity very seriously. And here's the thing, you know, traditional trial in America at least is like the one place where we bring together a bunch of disinterested under-prepared people. And on top of everything else, we tell them to do what to shut up. Don't talk to anybody at home. Don't talk to your fellow jurors until we get to the deliberations. We tell them to defer to the judge and the lawyers wisdom and what questions are going to be asked. Paul Grewal (37m 32s): And at the same time, we tell them your job is to get this right, because you own the responsibility of assessing, you know, the, the facts that are presented that's crazy. We would never do that in any other setting, right. We would be, it would be like telling a, a lecture hall full of high of college students or high school students in a classroom that for the next three months, they would be learning about every facet of AP calculus. But at no point in time, will we allow you to ask a single question of the instructor for fear that somehow that might encourage you to form an impression of the subject matter prematurely, it's nuts, it's nuts. And so I just never understood the logic of it did on rare occasion that a jury or propose a question that was irrelevant or even prejudicial if responded to in a certain way. Paul Grewal (38m 18s): Yes, I suppose that happened less than five times and you know, 30 jury trials, 30 or 35 jury trial. So it was a no brainer to me that was the other form, by the way that I thought I made a big difference. I gave my trial lawyers the opportunity at the end of each week when it was a multi-week trial, as these patent and trade secret cases tended to be, I would give them a chance to do many closing arguments to say, Hey, before we send these jurors home for three days or whatever. And so that they can forget everything that you've just spent a week preparing, let me give you 30 minutes or even 15 minutes to just summarize and synthesize everything that we've just heard. And it just, it made so much more logical sense to me. Paul Grewal (38m 60s): If, if we just took a small step back and try to remember what we were there, we were there to get a good answer to a hard problem. We weren't there to like maintain control or authority as the judge. We weren't there to like, you know, sound good as trial lawyers. We were there to get a good result for the clients. And I thought, I just think that too often, we lose sight of that. And the way we design these exercises, Rahul Ravipudi (39m 22s): I love that. So you sound, actually, this is, this has always intrigued me here in California. You sound a lot like a California state judge. Paul Grewal (39m 34s): I take that as a compliment. It is absolutely Rahul Ravipudi (39m 37s): A compliment. So a lot of 90% of the VOD Deere's done by the trial lawyers. And it's very typical in my trials that the jurors are permitted to ask questions. I think it actually gets the jury fully engaged. The ones that are going to be engaged, get even more invested in the case, which I think is always good for the process, but I never understood why other federal court judges didn't see it your way. Cause it makes practical sense to do it the way you're suggesting. Paul Grewal (40m 9s): Yeah. I mean, look, I, I, I'm not alone or I was not alone. So I want to suggest I was, I was the only one I think. Yeah. I, I never saw any instance in which a contrary view came from a place other than trying to get it right. So I think everybody's operating a good faith here. I just think that traditions are hard to let go of, and there is no more traditional place than federal district court. I think also for a lot of judges or maybe not a lot, but too many judges. There's a fear of losing control, right? That if I let go of the reigns of this thing, if I let the lawyer start doing more than I might otherwise want, if I start leading jurors, get in on the act, my God, like, you know, what could happen, what could happen next? Paul Grewal (40m 51s): And you know, it is a little scary and there are risks that you need to be mindful of. But I just, you know, once I did it, a couple of times I found out that, you know, the water's just fine. You just kind of dip your toe in and try a few of these things once or twice before you jump in. And I'm still a long-term optimist that federal judges and judges all over the country will adopt some of these practices that are more common in the, in the state courts, at least here in California, but it's a, it's a slow process. And I think there's still a long way to go before we get there. We're going to Rahul Ravipudi (41m 22s): Take a break for 30 seconds to do recognize our sponsors. And we'll be right back 0 (41m 28s): During our quick break. I want to remind you that our show today is being sponsored by smart advocates. Smart advocate is a case management program designed for trial law and personal injury law firms all the way from smaller PI firms to the largest MDL and class action firms. It's the case management software we use at our office and we love it. Our show also is sponsored by hype legal hype. Legal is a full service digital marketing firm started by friends of the pod, Tyler and Micah who have years of experience helping trialers getting great results in their cases. And now they're turning that attention to digital marketing. 0 (42m 8s): So check them out@hypelegal.com. Our show today is sponsored by expert Institute. Expert Institute is the ultimate partner for helping trial lawyers pair with the right experts for their cases and working their cases up all the way from intake through verdict. So check them out at expert institute.com/elevate ELA, w V a T E. And you will receive a 25% off discount on your first expert console. Paul, Rahul Ravipudi (42m 38s): You were talking about an effective advocacy being argument by analogy. Before I ask my next question, I just want to let you know, you don't know this, but when you switched from Facebook to Coinbase our, our mutual friend Aloke Sharma, he called me up. He's like, dude, Paul just went to Coinbase. And I was, and I thought, wow, he's going into the crypto world. And the first thing I thought was, well, then this world must be legitimate. And that was the first time I actually started investing. Not because I have any idea what crypto is even to this day, but because you, you entered that world. Rahul Ravipudi (43m 18s): So argument by analogy, are you able to use that to help explain to the lay people here on this podcast, what crypto is? Is it here to stay and which ones are or are not? Paul Grewal (43m 34s): Well, I don't have much of an opinion because I generally don't pay any attention to the market for different crypto assets in which assets have a long-term future in which don't, but I can explain a little bit about how crypto works, you know, the, the, the, to me like the best analogy for, for what, you know, what a cryptocurrency is is, is, is to think about crypto as a network and as an, and like any network, there are different participants involved in attempting to, you know, make the system as a whole work and function in crypto. The real innovation that came when Bitcoin was first announced to the world by Satoshi Nakamoto was this idea that the ledgers that were, are, that are used in traditional finance to track who's paying whom and who owns what at any given moment on any given day could be put on two servers or computers all over the world and distributed so that we no longer had rely upon a single source of authority, like a clearing house or an exchange, but instead could trust that all sorts of people or entities scattered all over the world could manage these transactions and make sure that when someone said they own this coin and wish to transfer it to that person, that they in fact were the rightful owner and that the person that they were seeking to transfer to was available on the network to receive it. Paul Grewal (44m 55s): So that's all that crypto is, is it takes a very ancient idea, which is that we want people to actually own the assets they say they own and be able to transfer them to people who are actually available to receive them and just makes it a much more distributed global electronic means. And that's, that's essentially how crypto crypto is in a nutshell, is it an asset? It is, you can think of, you can think of coins or tokens as assets like gold, like silver or seashells, if you want to go back to the most ancient analogy and, and, and, you know, going back to those ancient times, we've always as, as, as, as humans looked for stores of value, things that signified that you had invested effort or labor, or somebody else had such that you could exchange that for things that you wanted, but that weren't directly tied to the labor or the effort that you were able to provide. Paul Grewal (45m 54s): And, and that's all that crypto is it's really no more complicated than a, a distributed ledger of gold or seashells or whatever that are available to any person anywhere on the planet who has a smartphone and an internet connection. And 0 (46m 10s): You work for a company called Coinbase. Paul Grewal (46m 13s): I do. Can you explain what they do? Yeah. Yeah. So Coinbase is a, an exchange which allows people to buy, sell and trade crypto assets anywhere in the world. So trading of these crypto assets is really the first and most popular use cases, which it's, what's captured so much of the enthusiasm and energy that we've seen over the past year or two about crypto. And so Coinbase has a place for regular people to take a few dollars and convert it into a little bit of Bitcoin or Ethereum or any of the other assets that we list. And to begin to trade that crypto asset with other people, not just on Coinbase, but anywhere in the world who have an internet connection and which to either buy or sell or trade that same asset. Paul Grewal (47m 3s): Now, you know, one of the, one of the more interesting and ultimately for me, most compelling opportunities at Coinbase was that the trading of these assets was just the first phase. You know, the, the, the, the promise we see in crypto is that there really is the potential for a crypto economy that, that supports not just trading or speculation, but rather payments, for example, so that people can use crypto to buy and real stuff like a pizza or dry cleaning or, or, or, or a Tesla. And then beyond that, all sorts of other financial products like credit products, borrowing, and lending, and other things that people need in order to operate in the modern world. Paul Grewal (47m 44s): So that that's, that's sort of how we're thinking about this as we move ahead. Rahul Ravipudi (47m 48s): And how did you decide to enter the worlds of cryptocurrency and joined Coinbase? What intrigued you about this arena? So, Paul Grewal (47m 58s): I, I got my first exposure to crypto when I was at Facebook, when Facebook attempted to roll out it's global stable coin that it referred to at that time as Libra. And if you paid any attention to this world, or, you know, watch Twitter, you saw that roll out to not go so well. It was met with a lot of hostility, both in the public, but also more importantly, among legislators and policy makers all over the world, who felt, felt that, that, that the coin posed a threat to the global financial system. And so that was my introduction to crypto. And as you might imagine, my first impression was, God, that's the last thing I want to spend the next five or 10 years of my career working on, but it whetted my appetite to learn more about some of the foundations of crypto to read the Satoshi white paper, which was really the first laypersons explanation for how this system could work. Paul Grewal (48m 52s): And as I went down, what a lot of people refer to as a crypto rabbit hole, I became more and more intrigued by, you know, the promise of this thing. I came to understand that this wasn't just a bunch of, you know, anarchists looking to thwart, you know, the sovereignty of nations with an alternative monetary system, that this was actually a very interesting, thoughtful, compelling technology that could solve a lot of problems with our current financial system that regular people deal with every day. And then once I got bitten by that bug, when I was offered the opportunity to come lead the, the legal compliance and other functions of the company, I just couldn't say no. Paul Grewal (49m 33s): And so here I am. Rahul Ravipudi (49m 34s): W what are some of the problems that everyday people deal with that crypto currencies can potentially solve? Yeah. Paul Grewal (49m 44s): So there, there are a number of them, but I'll give you one example that's most compelling to me, and that is the problem of cross border remittances, right? So if you are a worker in one country who hails from another country, and you wish to send home a portion of your paycheck to support your family today in 2021, you have to run an incredible gauntlet of money, trans middle firms, wire payments, transaction fees, just to get the dollar you might earn here in the United States, back to your family in India, or the Philippines or any other country. And that dollar doesn't stay a dollar. Paul Grewal (50m 25s): It turns into something much less because of all the intermediaries that have to touch that payment in order to, in order to transfer value, crypto offers the potential to eliminate all of that. So that if I have a part of a Bitcoin that I've earned here in United States for my day's work, I can in an instant, without any middle person, any intermediary, and instantly I can transfer that, you know, that day's wage to my mother or to my child, or to whomever else anywhere around the world and to do so without any delay. That's a very powerful use case that certainly speaks to, you know, I think the problem we have with the current financial system, which is that there are a lot of layers that are involved in, in, in between one person and another, and each of those layers wants their cut. Paul Grewal (51m 13s): And we think there's a way to eliminate, if not all of it, much of it in a way that will, in order to regular people's benefit, 0 (51m 20s): I would assume in, in your work, in the legal departments at Facebook, in our Coinbase, you are obviously not doing all of the legal work yourself, but are managing teams of lawyers and, you know, large law firms and, and Paul Grewal (51m 35s): A lot of small ones too. I want to put in a plug for the boutiques and sole practitioners that we work with, who do amazing work. They don't often get enough attention. Yeah. I bet 0 (51m 44s): You probably find some of the best lawyers in those locations, but what, what are you looking for when you're trying to find counsel to work for companies like this? Yeah, Paul Grewal (51m 57s): Yeah. I mean, it's, it's a, it's a very fair question. I think that for me, the most important quality I look for in any outside counsel is the ability to understand the fundamental problem we're trying to solve. And they're not just willingness, but eagerness to scope the solution to that problem. So what I mean by that, well, you know, on rare occasions, you have to take a $500 million class action to trial. And if that's the case, then you need to assemble the armies and, and deploy the, the, the weaponry in order to prevail in that matter. And often those are massive in scale, but I'm just as often. Paul Grewal (52m 39s): And I, and I, I say I, in a very selfish sense, I have an incredible team of people who, as you allude to Ben, do the, lion's share almost all of the great work that we do at this company every day. And so what that team is looking for, the team that I lead in most instances, however, is, you know, an answer to a question, should we, should we include this feature in the next version of the product? Do we launch in Slovenia when we, we, we, we, we face some risk of an enforcement action by some regulator in that jurisdiction, do we run the risk of violating someone else's trade secret property rights when we hire a group engineers from that company, and despite our best efforts come to discover that they may have inadvertently brought over certain documents, things like that. Paul Grewal (53m 34s): I'm looking for lawyers who want to solve the problem as opposed to fit my question into some preconceived legal framework and, and think of, you know, think of these issues as topic for summary judgment or poor closing argument, as opposed to a business problem that just needs an answer. Rahul Ravipudi (53m 52s): I want to change topics just a little bit, because I want to cover at least two other areas with DePaul. If not more, I could talk to you for days, by the way, it is fun. So one of the things that I'd be remiss not to ask about this, just given your career trajectory, you were a president of the south Asian bar association in Northern California and the national south Asian bar association. What do you think? And have you ever experienced any situation where being south Asian, having a darker complexion complexion, anything like that was a barrier for you, and then how did you deal with it, or how did you take advantage of that situation? Rahul Ravipudi (54m 39s): Whichever it was Paul Grewal (54m 40s): Well, just to take a step back round hole, you know, Dan answer your question. It's important to understand or explain for where I came from. You know, I am the child of immigrants to this country. My parents came from India in the 1960s. I, I grew up in a very small town in Northeast Ohio in the 1970s, a town that had probably what 5,000 people at its peak. And so, you know, there were not a lot of folks like me in my hometown and where I went to grade school, middle school and high school. And so I would be disingenuous if I didn't acknowledge that, you know, over the course of that, that experience as a kid, I didn't hear some ugly things and experienced some, you know, painful events as a result of the fact that my family and I were different. Paul Grewal (55m 26s): We were turbines and more saris, and we did not necessarily fit into the classic image of small town, Ohio life that said I had a wonderful childhood and that community. And one of the things I was really grateful for, especially with, you know, looking back on it was that I learned that the world could be a, an unfair place, sometimes an ugly place. But at the end of the day, other than your family, maybe a few close friends, nobody was going to care about the aftermath of that for you or for me, or for anybody else more than you, or I would not no words in the end, at the end of the day, we have to take care of ourselves or else, you know, we're going to be sworn to be sorely disappointed in almost every instance. Paul Grewal (56m 14s): So, you know, that was the mentality I had going through, you know, my childhood and not when I went off to college and law school after that. So in the practice went on occasion, you know, I came across it ignorant judge, or an opposing counsel who, who, who, who frankly lacked class. You know, I, I learned that the problem or I, I, I still had the attitude that the problem ultimately was theirs, not mine. And there were many instances where, you know, it was important for me to be generous and understanding that someone's comment or observation wasn't coming from a place of ugliness per se, but just ignorance. I'll give you one quick example. Paul Grewal (56m 54s): One of the most difficult I mentioned I did lose at trial as a trial lawyer. And so it's important to acknowledge that one of the most difficult losses I had was in a patent case. I tried in, in east Texas and in a small town called Marshall, which in the, at least in the early two thousands was, was trying a lot of bad cases for interesting reasons. And, you know, as I'm walking out with my team, because these cases aren't generally tried by one lawyer, they're tried by a team of lawyers. I'm standing in the parking lot. Having just heard that my client had been socked with a nine figure verdict, not your best day in, in, in most trial lawyers lives. Right? Anyway, long story short, as I'm literally on the verge of tears, as I'm loading up the banker's boxes into the rental car, one of the jurors comes running across the parking lot to find me. Paul Grewal (57m 41s): And she, she sees that I'm over there on the corner of the lot. She grabs me by the arm. She looks me in the eye and she says, you know, I bet you're feeling really bad about what just happened in there, but I want you to know something. If I ever get into trouble and need to hire a lawyer, or a friend of mine needs to hire a lawyer, I'm going to tell that friend, you go and hire that Mr. Sanchez, he's the best trial lawyer I ever saw. So she thought she thought I was Mexican American or Hispanic or whatever. And that's, you know, I, I could have taken offense to that at that moment. And instead I'd said, well, you know what? Ma'am thank you. I hope you'll tell them Paul Sanchez, you know, it was always there for you. And I let it go at that. So you have to, you have to try to assess any circumstance, whether someone's truly bigoted and coming from a place of hate or, you know, they're just doing the best they can. Paul Grewal (58m 27s): And that was the, that's the, that's the model I've always had in my head. And, you know, it served me reasonably well. Rahul Ravipudi (58m 33s): Fantastic. Let's talk about from, I'm not saying you're retiring or anything, Paul