Patrick D. Robbins

Patrick D. Robbins joins Signature Resolution with a career built across the highest levels of federal litigation. As a longtime federal prosecutor and partner at an international law firm practicing white collar criminal defense and complex commercial litigation, as well as Acting U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of California, he has occupied nearly every seat at the table in high-stakes civil and criminal disputes. Throughout his career, one conviction has held: that every person across the table or courtroom is a relationship in progress, and that credibility built through honesty and genuine respect outlasts any advantage won through pressure. Patrick brings that philosophy to every mediation, moving even the most entrenched parties toward resolution by listening first and letting facts do the work.

For Patrick, resolution begins when every party in the room has been genuinely heard. Before sessions, he engages the parties with extensive pre-mediation outreach, seeking out the details that frequently prove most consequential for resolution. He gives parties direct, unhurried access to him, and asks each side what they want the other side to hear before working with them on how best to communicate it. No matter the dispute, Patrick aims to keep the environment open and conducive to honesty, while remaining focused on finding where the parties overlap. When cases reach an impasse, he draws on a firsthand command of how courts evaluate cases, what dispositive motions actually yield, and where the real risks lie – including at trial – grounding parties in the litigation reality they face to encourage new movement and open a path forward.

Patrick’s prosecution career spanned securities and commodities fraud, insider trading, trade secret theft, money laundering, organized crime and narcotics. As an Assistant U.S. Attorney in San Francisco, he rose to Chief of the Office’s Securities Fraud Section and led DOJ’s Enron-era energy market manipulation investigation, prosecuting individuals across multiple companies for manipulating electricity and natural gas prices. In 2004, Patrick re-joined his prior firm Shearman & Sterling LLP as a partner where he built one of the West Coast’s leading white collar criminal defense practices. Patrick has represented major financial institutions, Fortune 100 companies, early- and late-stage technology companies, as well as countless executives and board members in securities class actions, derivative actions, price fixing, monopolization and merger cases, and civil and criminal regulatory claims. After two decades of civil and criminal defense work, he returned to public service as the First Assistant U.S. Attorney and ultimately the Acting U.S. Attorney, leading a 300-person office through one of the most demanding periods in the Northern District’s recent history. That progression, from both sides of the courtroom to the executive office of one of the country’s most prominent federal districts, gave Patrick an incomparably complete understanding of how complex cases are built and pursued, what a strong defense against them requires, and what it ultimately takes to move toward resolution instead.

His private practice included a substantial focus on independent board investigations for major corporations. Retained by independent board committees to conduct objective investigations, address related shareholder claims, present findings, and engage with the government on charging decisions, Patrick operated with the same structural neutrality and accountability to facts that defines his mediation practice. That experience, layered on 15 years of court-appointed mediation and early neutral evaluation work for the Northern District of California, reflects a practitioner who has been a trusted, objective fact-finder for some of the most sophisticated stakeholders in the country.

Now at Signature Resolution, Patrick brings a command of complex disputes earned from every angle of the legal process, backed by a career defined by the belief that how you treat the people across the table matters as much as what you know about the case. For attorneys navigating high-stakes disputes, that rare combination is the key to resolution.