Eimer Stahl is pleased to announce that Sopen B. Shah has joined the firm as a Partner. Shah will serve as Co-Managing Partner of the firm’s Madison office, alongside Ryan Walsh, and as head of Eimer Stahl’s Critical Motions & Appeals practice.
One of the Midwest’s most accomplished appellate advocates, Shah comes to Eimer Stahl from Perkins Coie LLP (now Ashurst Perkins Coie LLP), where she was a Partner in the firm’s Appeals, Issues & Strategy group and served as litigation lead for its Madison office. Her practice focuses on appeals, as well as complex trial-court litigation that demands appellate-grade strategy from day one. Shah has handled cases in the Supreme Court of the United States and other federal and state trial and appellate courts nationwide.
Before entering private practice, Shah served as Deputy Solicitor General of Wisconsin, where she argued in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit and the Wisconsin Supreme Court and prevailed on the merits in every decided case. She clerked for Judge Debra Ann Livingston of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit and Judge Amul Thapar, then of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Kentucky.
Shah earned her J.D. from Yale Law School, where she was co-managing editor of the Yale Law Journal, and graduated magna cum laude from Harvard College. Before law school, she was a financial analyst and television and radio commentator at Bloomberg.
She is listed in Chambers USA among Wisconsin's leading commercial litigators and in The Best Lawyers in America for both appellate and commercial litigation, has won the State Bar of Wisconsin's best-brief award, and was nominated by the President of the United States in 2022 to serve as U.S. Attorney for the Western District of Wisconsin.
An elected member of the American Law Institute, Shah has taught appellate advocacy and currently teaches deposition skills as an adjunct professor at the University of Wisconsin Law School. She is board chair of the Clean Lakes Alliance, treasurer of the appellate practice section of the State Bar of Wisconsin, and a member of Law Forward’s board.
“Sopen is one of the finest issues-and-appeals lawyers in the country, and she is exactly whom clients want when the stakes are highest and the law is unsettled,” said Ryan Walsh, Co-Managing Partner of Eimer Stahl’s Madison office. Shah added, “Eimer Stahl has built a national reputation for taking on consequential cases with lean, senior teams, which is my preferred way to practice. Eimer is the ideal platform to serve clients across the Midwest and nationally, and I am thrilled to partner with Ryan in building the Madison office into the region's destination for critical motions and appeals.”
