Eric Del Pozo

Eric Del Pozo is a member of the firm’s Litigation and Appellate practices. A versatile advocate, Eric has significant experience litigating novel, complex, and high‑stakes matters at the appellate, trial, and administrative levels. This experience has run the gamut from handling commercial disputes, to representing important governmental interests, to holding those in positions of power to account.

Eric has argued close to fifty appeals in federal and state court and has briefed more than one hundred appeals overall. These appeals frequently have involved precedent-setting legal questions, on topics such as federal jurisdiction and preemption, agency authority and deference, business and consumer fraud, class‑action standards, healthcare reimbursement, insurer insolvency, coastal management, free speech, due process, selective prosecution, false arrest, and defamation per se. Eric has also prepared colleagues for oral argument in hundreds of cases, at every level of the federal and state judicial systems.

Before joining Shipman, Eric served for six years as Assistant Solicitor General for New York State, primarily litigating appeals on behalf of the State and its officers and agencies. Many of these matters were at the forefront of law and public policy. For example, he defended New York’s concealed-carry licensing law in the U.S. Supreme Court in NYSRPA v. Bruen; represented the State Attorney General in responding to an unprecedented Congressional subpoena; secured the affirmance of a nine-figure enforcement judgment against a shipping company for violating federal and state statutes protecting the public health; obtained the dismissal of a global energy conglomerate’s federal lawsuit claiming that a state investigation had an unconstitutional motivation; and successfully defended orders compelling the former President of the United States to sit for a civil investigative deposition and holding him in contempt of court for disobeying document requests. In each of 2017 and 2022, Eric received the Louis J. Lefkowitz Award, given annually by New York’s Solicitor General, for outstanding individual performance.

In addition, Eric spent several years as an appellate prosecutor for the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office, securing affirmances of numerous felony convictions.

Eric draws on his expertise analyzing the strength of legal claims and defenses when handling matters at the trial or investigative stages. While at Shipman, he co‑led the defense of the largest State False Claims Act case ever brought to trial in Connecticut, achieving a verdict of no liability for a pharmacy’s founder and president. Previously in private practice, Eric obtained a writ of mandamus unwinding a state governor’s unlawful allocation of hundreds of millions of dollars in federal settlement proceeds. Outside of court, Eric has helped companies facing governmental inquiries to avoid or narrow contemplated enforcement action.

Eric continually looks for opportunities to help Shipman vindicate the broader public interest, including through pro bono work. In the past, he represented a leading civil rights organization as amicus curiae in support of a petition for certiorari, prompting a unanimous summary reversal by the U.S. Supreme Court of the lower court’s grant of qualified immunity in an excessive‑force case. For this effort, Eric was interviewed in The Atlantic. More recently, on behalf of a nationwide organization of elected prosecutors, he authored an amicus brief raising arguments that the U.S. Supreme Court echoed in upholding laws disarming domestic abusers who are subject to judicial restraining orders.

Eric graduated from Dartmouth College and then, summa cum laude and first in his class, from St. John’s University School of Law. After law school, he clerked for the Honorable Raymond J. Dearie of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York and the Honorable Reena Raggi of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit.