Automotive & Mobility

Automotive clients routinely tap our class action litigators to defend them in their most challenging cases, including class actions involving consumer, privacy, securities, antitrust, and other claims. Our team has years of extensive experience creating resolute arguments to aggressively attack the pleadings, defeat class certification, achieve favorable settlements, and, if necessary, take complex cases to trial.

Major multinational companies trust Winston to defend their products and reputations in high-profile, high-stakes product liability and mass tort (PLMT) claims. Winston’s PLMT Practice is among the most seasoned in the industry, with a unique combination of extensive trial experience and a deep bench of experienced lawyers with expansive technical.

We frequently serve as lead trial counsel, as well as multi-district litigation (MDL) or statewide coordinating counsel, local counsel, and class action and appellate counsel for our automotive clients. Our team can join a case at any stage and help obtain positive results. We work efficiently and effectively with other law firms to aggressively and strategically litigate, and often work with local counsel or in a “virtual firm” model.

Winston has built a full-service consulting eDiscovery and Information Governance Practice providing services to our clients and case teams in the complex areas of e-discovery and information governance, both within the United States and around the world. Our team includes highly experienced partners, e-discovery attorneys, review attorneys, project managers, and technologists dispersed among our offices.

Our e-discovery team, which has long-standing relationships with companies in the automotive and mobility industry:

• services more than 800 matters annually;
• has 150+ production terabytes under management; and
• performs over 250,000 hours of project management and review annually.

Winston attorneys help automotive companies navigate intellectual property (IP) rights, import/export restrictions, and technology tariffs, and our attorneys have significant experience representing and counseling companies with respect to antitrust issues and litigation relating to the licensing of IP to the automotive industry.

Looking ahead, we are actively working with organizations to prepare for the waves of patent disputes that will be unleashed as autonomous vehicles and smart cities combine data processing, radar, navigation systems, wireless communication, and other technologies.

Our corporate attorneys advise on a variety of transactions for automotive industry clients, including mergers and acquisitions, private equity deals, and other strategic transactions. We also handle real estate matters, lending transactions, debt financings, and the securitization of prime and subprime automobile loans, automobile leases, and dealer floor plan loans.

Our automotive finance experience ranges from establishing finance companies and the related dealer, wholesale, and retail programs; financing manufacturing-plant construction; and assisting with complex mergers and acquisitions to reorganizing leasing operations (including establishing Internal Revenue Code like-kind exchange programs) and arranging capital-market financings and securitizations of all types.