George C. Aguilar

Partner

George C. Aguilar concentrates his practice on the litigation of complex actions including securities class actions, shareholder derivative actions, and antitrust actions.  Mr. Aguilar has successfully litigated numerous actions on behalf of shareholder clients against fraudulent management and company insiders, and has secured meaningful corporate governance reform at companies across the U.S.

Before joining Robbins Umeda LLP in 2007, Mr. Aguilar was a federal prosecutor for seventeen years with the U.S. Attorney’s Office in San Diego, where he tried just about every type of offense prosecuted by the Office, including those relating to immigration, drugs, firearms, terrorism, civil rights, white collar crime, and financial institution fraud.  Mr. Aguilar served for four years as a trial lawyer on the Financial Institution Fraud Task Force and another four years in the Major Frauds Section.  He led grand jury investigations and indicted and tried complex white collar criminal cases involving corporate, securities, bank, investor, tax, foreign currency and bankruptcy fraud, bank bribery, and money laundering. Mr. Aguilar has tried more than forty felony criminal trials to verdict, authored thirty-five appellate briefs, and argued more than a dozen cases on appeal before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.  

Prior to joining the U.S. Attorney's Office, Mr. Aguilar worked on complex securities defense litigation at Morrison Foerster LLP in San Francisco.

Mr. Aguilar received his law degree from Boalt Hall School of Law at the University of California.  While at Boalt, Mr. Aguilar served on the Moot Court Board and as managing editor of the La Raza Law Journal.  He studied political science and journalism at the University of Southern California.

Selected Noteworthy Cases

• Brocade Communications Systems, Inc., In re Brocade Communications Systems, Inc. Derivative Litigation, No. 1:05CV041683 (Cal. Super. Ct.-Santa Clara County):  Mr. Aguilar played a key role in shareholder derivative litigation involving a criminal options backdating scheme at Brocade.  Working closely with partners Marc Umeda and Craig Smith, Mr. Aguilar helped prevent an inadequate settlement that would have released all defendants for no money to the company.  The firm prosecuted the action until Brocade formed a Special Litigation Committee to consider the plaintiff's claims, and Mr. Aguilar successfully presented facts and law to the Special Litigation Committee on behalf of the firm's shareholder clients.  Brocade ultimately retained the firm as co-counsel to prosecute its claims against Brocade's officers and directors.

• Heelys, Inc., In re Heelys Inc. Derivative Litigation, No. 3:07-CV-1682-K (N.D. Tex. Nov. 17, 2009): Mr. Aguilar, along with the firm, represented shareholder clients in a derivative action involving Heelys, Inc., a designer, marketer, and distributor of sports products.  Mr. Aguilar was instrumental in litigating the settlement and helped secure extensive corporate governance reforms, including the creation of a safety compliance manager and a disclosure and controls manager, the adoption of compensation principles by the board of directors of Heelys, and stricter insider trading controls.

• Beazer Homes USA, Inc., In re Beazer Homes USA, Inc. Derivative Litigation, No. 1:07-CV-0842-CC (N.D. Ga. Feb. 17, 2010): Mr. Aguilar was instrumental in securing substantive corporate governance reforms on behalf of Beazer Homes USA, Inc., following claims that company directors and officers had engaged in improper lending practices, accounting manipulations, and misled the public about the company's financial condition.  The governance improvements Mr. Aguilar led the firm in achieving include key personnel changes, organizational changes to the company's field operations, and adoption of a new code of business conduct and ethics.

• Private Equity Firms, Police & Fire Retirement System of Detroit v. Bain Capital Partners, No. 1:07-CV-12388(EFH) (D. Mass.): Mr. Aguilar leads the firm as part of a team of plaintiff firms in an ongoing anti-trust class action suit against several private equity firms.  The case involves allegations of conspiracy among defendants to rig bids, restrict the supply of private equity financing, fix transaction prices, and divide up the market for private equity services for leveraged buyouts.  Mr. Aguilar has so far conducted several depositions of some of the key private equity principals during the initial discovery phase of the case.