Travis J. Anderson

Sheppard Mullin • Del Mar


As a brand-new Sheppard Mullin associate 15 years ago, Travis Anderson "cut [his] teeth on workplace violence restraining orders." 


"I did a lot of them for Costco and other employers," he said. Those fast-moving cases are "kind of the Wild West," and they turned out to be "a formative proving ground" where he learned to be quick on his feet in the courtroom.


Anderson said that early training serves him well now as the co-leader of the firm's trade secrets team. "I think it really set the stage for why I love the trade secret work because oftentimes when an employer finds out that their trade secrets have been stolen ... it has that same degree of urgency that you might find when you're worried about someone going postal."


He has about a half-dozen secrets cases pending currently, including several in arbitration.


Last year, Anderson represented an insurance brokerage in suing two brokers who stole a large database of client and account information when they left to join another company. He oversaw a forensic investigation that uncovered the wrongdoing, including that the new employer was complicit. The case settled in the fall on the eve of trial in arbitration.


That win brought him a number of other insurance clients and cases in the highly competitive insurance field. "It's been bananas really for a better part of a decade now."


Three other cases Anderson handled over the last year did go through trial. "It's an unusual number of trials for me" in one year, he said.


He won a jury verdict in February defending Costco against claims by a former quality control inspector that she was twice forced to stay on the job after developing severe pain requiring hospitalization. During cross-examination, Anderson presented her with evidence from her medical records and timecards. They "showed she didn't work at all on the days that she was hospitalized," he said. Soon, "she wouldn't really answer my questions any further substantively, but you could see that the lights were going on with the jury." De La Rosa v. Costco Wholesale Corp., 3:21-cv-01630 (S.D. Cal., filed Sept. 16, 2021).


Anderson's two other trial victories came in non-employment commercial cases. A year ago, he won $3 million in Massachusetts for a biotech consulting firm when an immunotherapy company it had helped through regulatory problems then refused to pay. Skysis LLC v. Agenus Inc., 2181CV00772 (Middlsex Cnty Super. Ct., filed April 7, 2021).


Earlier this year, he won an arbitration award of $4.5 million, including $2 million in fees, for a company that had created software to produce extremely high-quality sound using specialized headphones the defendant falsely claimed to have invented. "We had to ... put together a pretty complex constellation of circumstantial evidence to paint the picture for the arbitrator," he said about the case. Scaeva Technologies v. Yellow Matter Entertainment LLC, 2:24-cv-04303 (C.D. Cal., filed May 23, 2024).