Gilbert R. Serota

Gilbert Serota is a Bates Group Consulting and Testifying Expert. Gil brings to our clients more than 40 years’ experience as a trial lawyer specializing in customer and employee arbitrations, class action securities cases, and litigation arising out of mergers and acquisitions. He has taught Securities Regulation as an Adjunct Professor at Hastings College of the Law, consulted for directors’ and officers’ insurers on class actions, testified as an expert in securities related litigation, and served as a FINRA arbitrator. He has been a frequent speaker at SIFMA national and regional meetings. Gil offers expertise in securities industry standards, including suitability, supervision, insider trading and self-directed accounts. He is also well-versed in trial preparation and strategy, attorney standards of care, and the fiduciary duty of public company boards of directors and special committees.

As a litigation partner from 1983 to 2023 at Orrick, Howard Rice and Arnold & Porter, Gil handled more than 500 customer and employee arbitrations before FINRA, NASD, and NYSE on behalf of both claimants and respondents. He served as lead counsel in arbitrating more than 50 to a final award. He is one of the few litigators to have tried a securities fraud class action to a successful jury verdict and to have defeated the SEC in an administrative law trial seeking to discipline a senior management employee of a brokerage firm. Gil has spearheaded sensitive internal investigations at public companies involving C-Suite executives and advised boards of directors on hostile takeover responses and shareholder rights plans. He has been named to the “Best Lawyers in America” in Securities Litigation since 2007.

Gil graduated from Princeton University cum laude, majoring in Public and International Affairs, and from Columbia Law School where he was a Kent Scholar and served as Editor and Business Manager of the Columbia Law Review. While at Columbia Law he spent one semester as Professor Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s teaching assistant. Following law school, he clerked for Judge Walter Mansfield on the United States Court of Appeal for the Second Circuit.

He was a member of the State Bar of California for more than 45 years.