Ryan focuses his practice on commercial, business, and securities litigation. He also has extensive experience litigating environmental matters. Ryan has been with McGuireWoods LLP since 2006, following a one-year clerkship with the Honorable James R. Spencer, then-Chief Judge of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia.
Ryan has litigated matters in state and federal courts, taking lead roles in pre-trial strategy, written discovery and deposition practice, discovery dispute resolution, mock trials and focus group exercises, briefing and arguing both dispositive and non-dispositive motions, settlement negotiations, and bench and jury trials. He has both first- and second-chair jury trial experience and has taken or defended dozens of fact, expert, and corporate witness depositions. He also has substantial experience conducting legal and regulatory compliance audits on behalf of Fortune 100 and 500 companies in the financial services, antitrust, and Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) contexts, interviewing employees throughout the United States and in South America.
Fluent in Spanish, Ryan regularly uses his language skills to assist clients whose legal needs cross international borders or require Spanish fluency. Examples of such work include conducting deposition and trial witness preparation sessions in Spanish; assisting with interviews of a client’s employees in connection with an FCPA audit in Bogota, Colombia; translating and communicating with in-house counsel regarding environmental and permitting documents issued by Mexican regulatory agencies; analyzing Spanish-language documents generated by Mexican and Spanish employees of a Fortune 500 client for antitrust audits; and translating contracts, employee manuals, and product warnings.
Ryan has maintained a robust pro bono practice with a particular emphasis on representing Spanish-speaking clients in landlord-tenant, unpaid wage, and asylum matters. Perhaps his most significant pro bono accomplishment was attaining asylum—in contested U.S. Immigration Court proceedings—on behalf of a Colombian mother and son whose family had been terrorized by the FARC and paramilitary groups across Colombia for two decades.
During law school, Ryan was senior notes and comments editor and executive board member of the University of Richmond Law Review. He earned CALI Excellence for the Future Awards in Contracts (Section Honor) and International Business Transactions, placed first in the Walter Scott McNeill Legal Writing Competition two years in a row, and served as Chief Justice of the Honor Council. He also received the T.C. Williams Law School Scholarship Award, presented to the graduating student who made the most significant contribution to legal scholarship. He was awarded the J.G. White Prize for Excellence in Spanish for his undergraduate work at Cornell University, supplementing his studies with full Spanish-language immersion at la Universidad de Sevilla, in Seville, Spain.
