Bobby Woo

is a partner in King & Spalding’s Atlanta office, with more than sixteen years of experience working and litigating in state and federal courts. Mr. Woo is a graduate of Harvard College (A.B. magna cum laude ’89) and Harvard Law School (J.D. cum laude ’94), where he served as an editor of the Harvard Law Review. After clerking for the Hon. Stanley F. Birch, Jr. of the Eleventh Circuit, Mr. Woo joined King & Spalding’s Tort Litigation practice group, where he focuses on product liability defense, including medical devices, pharmaceutical products, and other consumer products.

From 1996 to 2001, Mr. Woo represented a local, grassroots coalition of nearly thirty civic, charitable and ethnic organizations who came together to oppose Georgia’s proposed TANF (Temporary Aid to Needy Families) program. The proposed program would have discriminated against legal immigrants by denying them the same benefits granted to citizens. Over the next four and a half years, sending letter briefs to legislators and addressing committees in both houses of the Georgia General Assembly, Mr. Woo led a legislative campaign to convince the General Assembly that the unequal treatment of legal immigrants was not only bad policy but also would not withstand a constitutional challenge. In 1997, 1998, and 1999, the group was able to obtain fixed one- and two-year extensions of TANF benefits for legal immigrants. Finally, in the 2001 legislative session, the group succeeded in passing legislation that permanently extended benefits to all legal immigrants under the same conditions given to citizens. The result protected the rights of the 1,100 or so non-citizens who at the time of passage sought public assistance in Georgia each year, for overall benefits of approximately $1.02 million annually.

In 2000, the State Bar of Georgia awarded Mr. Woo the H. Sol Clark Award, its highest award for individual pro bono work, for his work on behalf of indigent immigrants in Georgia. He also was named the Young Lawyer of the Year (2000) by the Anti-Defamation League’s Atlanta office.
Mr. Woo is a member of the firm’s Diversity Committee, where he chairs the Minority/Woman-Owned Business Enterprise (MWBE) Subcommittee, a subcommittee dedicated to the advancement of racial and gender diversity in the wider legal community.

Mr. Woo also led the Atlanta office’s pro bono asylum project, which, in 2006, devoted more than 1,500 pro bono hours to the representation of fourteen individuals seeking political asylum in the United States.

Memberships

Asian American Justice Center (National Advisory Council); American Bar Association (Litigation Section); American Health Lawyers Association; Atlanta Bar Association; Georgia Asian Pacific American Bar Association (past president); Georgia Asian Pacific American Bar Association Law Foundation (board member); Georgia Asylum Immigration Network (past board member); Georgia Committee on Access and Fairness in the Courts; International Association of Defense Counsel; National Asian Pacific American Bar Association.