Richard R. Thomas

Mr. Thomas is a shareholder at Smith LC, and manages the firm’s Arizona office. Mr. Thomas’s practice focuses on business litigation, with a special emphasis on trade secret and other intellectual property litigation.

Mr. Thomas graduated from Brigham Young University in 1980 with a Bachelor of Arts degree in English. He received his law degree, cum laude, from Washington & Lee University Law School in 1983. At Washington & Lee, Mr. Thomas was the captain of the National Moot Court team and received the American Jurisprudence Award in Evidence.

Throughout his career, Mr. Thomas has successfully protected and vindicated the rights of small-to-medium-sized business owners in a wide variety of business disputes, often against larger competitors. Mr. Thomas’s accomplishments include serving as lead counsel in the following:

• Claims for more than 70 plaintiffs in a large investment fraud case against the professionals of the former Mortgages Limited in Arizona, resulting in settlements of more than $20,000,000.

• Representation of a bankruptcy trustee in a large bank failure in the Midwest in a case against officers, directors, and the bank’s outside auditor, resulting in a seven figure settlement.

• Trade secret and unfair competition claims against a world-wide consumer products company on behalf of a small biotech company in an emerging technology, with alleged damages of more than $1 billion.

• Copyright infringement/trade secret misappropriation case on behalf of the largest CFO business in the country, resulting in a favorable settlement.

• Substantial verdict for a successful pain physician against a major metropolitan hospital for wrongfully interfering with the doctor’s medical practice.

• Multimillion dollar settlement against a major Wall Street investment firm for trade secret misappropriation.

• Defense verdict for a small business owner in a multimillion-dollar claim brought by a disgruntled minority shareholder of a dissolved corporation.

• Successfully defeated the efforts of a national company to enforce an unreasonable restrictive covenant not to compete against an entrepreneur with a growing competing business.

Through these and other successes throughout his career, Mr. Thomas has demonstrated a commitment to his personal slogan: “Clients want solutions, not more problems.”