Kathryn Deal

Partner

Key Experience

• Represents corporate and institutional clients in high-stakes class action and commercial litigation nationwide.
• Counsels clients on consumer-facing communications, privacy policies, and terms and conditions to facilitate statutory compliance and mitigate aggregate litigation risk.
• Significant first-chair, civil trial experience in complex jury trials, bench trials and arbitration hearings.
• Leads the firm’s retail industry group and is an advocate for, and advisor to, many of the world’s most prominent retailers.

Practice

Kate Deal is a tactical litigator who designs and implements successful strategies to defeat complex cases and minimize litigation risk for her clients.

Kate focuses her practice on defending clients in aggregate litigation, including putative class actions, collective or mass proceedings, multidistrict litigation and state attorney general actions. She has served in a national counsel role, managing concurrent class, mass and individual lawsuits for Fortune 500 companies. 

Kate defends clients in the retail, energy, health care, telecommunications and financial services industries in complex, high-stakes litigation. On behalf of those companies, Kate has defeated putative class and mass actions arising under consumer protection statutes, privacy-based acts, tort laws, civil rights legislation, antitrust provisions and RICO (Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations) statutes. In addition, Kate has successfully represented her corporate clients at state and federal jury trials, bench trials and arbitration hearings on a variety of civil claims.

In particular, Kate is a trusted advisor to the retail industry, including the Retail Industry Leaders’ Association and the Retail Litigation Center. In that capacity, Kate advocates before regulators and advises retailers on emerging issues related to data collection and privacy (including biometrics, mobile tracking and app privacy), customer outreach, advertising, promotional pricing, automatic renewals, gift cards, loyalty programs, arbitration agreements, accessibility, vendor relationships and supply chain issues. In 2017, Kate and her colleagues organized a successful California Retail Class Action summit in New York City.