Christin J. Hill

Hill is a MoFo partner and a member of the firm's securities litigation, enforcement and white-collar defense group. She primarily handles large securities class actions for Fortune 500 companies. She is a former senior counsel at Uber Technologies Inc.; earlier, she served as an assistant district attorney in San Francisco, clerked for U.S. District Judge John A. Houston of San Diego and worked at Heller Ehrman LLP.

She said she enjoys securities defense work because the complaints often name people as well as the companies they work for. "My very first case at Heller was the options backdating litigation for Brocade Communications. That was one of the first such cases, and I found it really interesting--complex, high profile and newsworthy, and it was an opportunity to represent individuals, not just a corporation. Putting a face and name to a case adds interest for me."

Hill and the MoFo team scored a major win following two years of litigation for client Precision Castparts Corp., its CEO and its CFO in a securities class action that alleges the aircraft engine and industrial gas turbine manufacturer made misstatements and omissions in an earnings target announcement. Murphy v. Precision Castparts Corp., 3:16-cv-00521 (D. Ore., filed March 25, 2016).

The case was set for a rare January 2022 trial, but in late May 2021 U.S. Magistrate Judge Stacie F. Beckerman of Portland, Ore., reversed a previous decision and granted Precision Castparts a full defense victory. "A development in the 9th Circuit changed things," Hill said, citing the federal appellate court's recent holding that safe harbor provisions in the securities statutes protected Tesla chairman Elon Musk's statements. Beckerman held that Musk's non-actionable statements in the Tesla case were indistinguishable from similar forward-looking statements made by Precision Casting's officers.

"We'd been following the Tesla case, and we watched the oral argument over Zoom because we had an inkling that the outcome might be favorable for us," Hill said. "We brought our court's attention to the Tesla decision right away."

During that same week in May, Hill and colleagues prevailed for Larry Ellison, Oracle Corp. and Oracle America Inc. in a shareholder derivative action that claimed Oracle's board of directors harmed investors by not following through with a stated commitment to diversify its membership. Klein v. Ellison et al., 3 :20-cv-04439 (N.D. Cal., filed July 2, 2020).

In a Zoom hearing in April, Hill and her team called the allegations "outrageous" and urged U.S. Magistrate Judge Jacqueline Scott Corley of San Francisco to dismiss it. A month later, Corley did so.

"It was a big week, a huge week for us," Hill said.

Beyond defending Oracle's diversity efforts, Hill champions diversity and inclusion in the law. She is a 2020 Leadership Council on Legal Diversity Fellow and an active member of the Black Women Lawyers Association of Northern California.

"I believe in lifting while you climb," she said. "I have mentored while being mentored. It's part of my personal brand, and my firm values that."

-- John Roemer