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 more than 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, religious exercise, 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 an Assistant Solicitor General in the New York State Attorney General’s Office, handling appeals and other matters at the forefront of law and public policy. For example, Eric previously:

• 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 civil enforcement judgment against a global shipping company for violating statutes protecting the public health;
• secured the reversal of a decision holding a state statute regulating broadband internet access to be federally preempted;
• obtained the dismissal of a global energy company’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. 

In addition, Eric spent several years as an appellate prosecutor for the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office. While there, he secured affirmances of numerous felony convictions and played a key role on conviction‑integrity work.

Eric draws on his considerable expertise evaluating legal claims and defenses when handling matters at the ground level. 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. In addition, he was the primary architect and author of a groundbreaking regulatory petition that prompted a systemic funding increase, and update to the rate adjustment process, for a class of Connecticut healthcare providers. 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, and he also defended a nationwide consumer lender in the first major enforcement action brought by the newly created Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

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 distinct 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.