Nick S. Pujji

Pujji is one of the youngest full-equity partners at Dentons. "I focus on results for my clients, and having a distinguishing appearance can be a plus," he said. Pujji's employment and litigation practice involves high-profile business, trade secret, accessibility and class action matters. He also spends significant time acting as an outside general counsel to tech and entertainment companies and to foreign governments.

He represents U.S. financial institutions, major national restaurant brands like McDonald's Corp., retail clothing companies, furniture manufacturers and international automakers. He is outside counsel to British fashion retailer AllSaints and product purveyor Misfits Market.

Pujji's parents moved from India to Missouri when he was 16. "Growing up in St. Louis, I learned how to fit in. And I developed my entrepreneurial spirit." He said his wife is from an Indian family and is a founder of ClassPass Inc., a health club aggregator valued at more than $1 billion. People from far away lands have risk taking in their blood. My father is an entrepreneur. My brothers are a CEO and an investor."

He said he takes an entrepreneurial approach to the practice of law, and he finds some clients through his background, he said. "As one of Indian descent, Indian and Asian clients are my path of least resistance." Among them is Bikram HotYoga Co. Ltd. and the consulates of Qatar in Los Angeles and Kuwait in Los Angeles and New York. Since joining Dentons in 2016, Pujji said he has brought in more than 350 new clients and has opened more than 625 matters.

"I've managed to jump leaps and bounds ahead of most," he said. "The key is to be creative and produce a very strong work product. Focus on user-friendly, data-driven legal advice."

Among Pujji's specialties is his work for companies vulnerable to disability discrimination claims regarding their websites. "There are 40 or so plaintiffs' firms that target these sites with digital accessibility lawsuits," he said. "I pride myself on being young and technologically savvy, and I understand disability issues from my employment law background. I have cold-pitched thousands, and we handle hundreds of cases. We remediate and provide strategic guidance to minimize client exposure. We have paid close attention to the way the plaintiffs bar has attacked these sites. We marry that to our savvy regarding how to counterbalance the exposure."

One key is tailoring specific advice to individual sites and offering fixes including automatic scanning tools and tech plug-ins. "You retain us, it's like sending in the Navy Seals instead of the whole Army," Pujji said.

-- John Roemer