John-Paul S. Deol is a partner at Columbo Deol LLP specializing in labor and employment law. Senior executives, founders, investors, and the companies they lead retain him in the employment matters that most affect their careers and businesses: situations where the financial, reputational, and personal stakes are substantial, where opposing counsel are among the country's best, and where the wrong move cannot be undone. He practices in state and federal courts and in arbitration throughout the country, with a focus on California, Texas, New York, Washington, and the District of Columbia.
His clients include C-suite officers, general counsel, board directors, VPs, founders and co-founders of venture-backed companies, partners at law firms, venture capital partners, hedge fund principals, senior physicians and other healthcare leaders, in-house lawyers, and other accomplished professionals at the top of their fields. He also represents companies, whether publicly traded enterprises, Fortune 100 corporations, growth-stage technology businesses, investment firms, healthcare systems, or venture-backed startups whose employment problems carry outsized commercial or reputational consequences.
John-Paul's experience is extensive. He spent several years in exclusively defense-oriented roles at the AmLaw 100 firms of Sheppard, Mullin, Richter & Hampton LLP and Fenwick & West LLP, where he defended employers of every size, from Fortune 100 corporations to Silicon Valley unicorns, in complex employment, traditional labor, trade secrets, and employee mobility litigation. He has handled matters for clients in technology, finance, private equity, venture capital, life sciences, healthcare, legal services, and other industries, and his practice has long included the kinds of matters that demand discretion as much as legal skill.
In litigation, John-Paul handles discrimination, retaliation, sexual harassment, whistleblower, and wage-and-hour cases, including class actions and appeals, along with trade secret disputes, non-compete and non-solicit enforcement and defense, restrictive covenant matters, and disputes over compensation, bonuses, commissions, and equity ownership. He has obtained emergency relief in workplace violence cases and is regularly entrusted with internal investigations involving allegations against the most senior people in an organization.
A significant portion of his practice is devoted to crisis management. When a high-profile executive is accused of misconduct, when a senior departure threatens to become a litigation or media event, when a regulator or board demands answers on a tight timeline, or when an internal complaint has the potential to become public, clients with the most to lose call John-Paul. He has guided executives, founders, boards, and general counsel through the most sensitive employment situations of their careers, including matters involving investigations, press scrutiny, and regulatory exposure.
Because the most serious employment problems are usually the ones that can be prevented, John-Paul also maintains an extensive advisory and counseling practice. He is regularly engaged by executives weighing offers, exits, and equity arrangements, by founders building their teams and structuring their companies, and by general counsel and HR leaders facing the most difficult personnel decisions in their organizations. His counseling work spans executive hiring, separation, and severance; M&A diligence; discipline and termination decisions; restrictive covenants and trade secret protection; commission, bonus, and equity structures; accommodation requests; meal, rest, and overtime compliance; and the broader thicket of state, federal, and local employment law. He drafts the documents that govern these relationships, including employment and severance agreements, equity arrangements, employee handbooks, restrictive covenants, electronic communications policies, and a wide range of other contracts and policies, and he delivers training programs for company leadership and HR teams on the employment law topics that matter most to their businesses.
John-Paul is also retained as a mediator in employment and other civil disputes. His command of both the substantive law and the commercial realities driving each side, combined with experience representing the kinds of executives, founders, and companies most often on opposing ends of these matters, makes him an effective neutral in disputes that other mediators struggle to move. Parties and counsel select him for matters that require a mediator who understands the leverage points, valuation considerations, and human dynamics that determine whether a case settles or trial becomes inevitable.
John-Paul earned his J.D. from Santa Clara University School of Law in 2012, graduating in the top 15 percent of his class with multiple academic awards. While practicing full time, he completed Yale University's accelerated, eleven-month Master of Public Health program in 2022, where he served as Lead Editor of the Yale Journal of Health Policy, Law, and Ethics and undertook coursework at Yale Law School. He received his B.A. from the University of California, Berkeley in 2009, graduating with highest distinction (Berkeley's equivalent of summa cum laude) and as a member of Phi Beta Kappa.
His standing in the profession has been recognized formally and informally. The South Asian Bar Association of Northern California named him a Rising Star in 2018. He has served on the boards of SABA-NC and the Bar Association of San Francisco, and has held leadership positions within the American Bar Association. Since 2017, he has been a voting member of the University of California, San Francisco's Institutional Review Board, where he helps oversee the ethical conduct of human-subjects research at one of the country's leading academic medical centers. He also maintains an active pro bono practice in federal trial and appellate courts.
Away from his practice, John-Paul is a committed traveler, with a particular fondness for Spain and Italy, and a serious student of languages. He is fluent in Italian and holds C1 certification in Spanish from the Spanish Ministry of Education and the Instituto Cervantes, the second-highest level the Instituto offers. He is proficient in French and is currently studying Portuguese. He has also studied Punjabi, Hindi, Modern Greek, and Latin.
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