Lisa S. Tsai

The Professionals Behind the Deal

Tsai's practice pursues not only the counterparty but the professionals whose work made the deal possible. In a professional-liability action arising from the same Lake Las Vegas refinancing, she represented investment funds against CBRE, whose appraiser prepared the valuation; after factual and expert discovery, the case settled for $21 million — a separate recovery, treated in the later Credit Suisse accounting as a prior payment rather than a component of the jury's damages assessment.

In matters arising from a $500 million collateralized-debt transaction, she represented investment funds in a fraud action against Royal Bank of Scotland and a separate legal-malpractice action against Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe over its work on the transaction. RBS settled before depositions; Orrick settled before summary judgment. She also represented Otto Bock Healthcare North America in a $90 million legal-malpractice action alleging negligent antitrust advice in the acquisition of Freedom Innovations, which settled confidentially after factual discovery and expert reports.

Her other professional-liability matters include claims concerning PwC Mexico's audits for Rabobank, McDermott Will & Emery's transactional work for Oroco Capital, and claims pursued for bankruptcy and liquidating trusts — each turning on engagement letters, audit files, valuation models, acquisition advice, expert standards, causation, and damages particular to the assignment.

The Partner Whose Interest Was Taken

Carling O'Brien co-founded Emerald Lake Capital Management and held partnership and carried-interest rights in the private-equity firm she helped build. Co-founder Dan Lukas later terminated her for cause. O'Brien alleged the justification was manufactured to confiscate her ownership and compensation interests — and that false descriptions of her conduct were circulated to the firm's investors.

Tsai and Ryan Goldstein led the case through a two-week arbitration hearing in Los Angeles in August and September 2023, building the record from partnership agreements, grant documents, termination provisions, investor communications, and the chronology preceding the dismissal. In March 2024, the three-member panel issued an interim decision in O'Brien's favor. The dispute settled in May 2024 on confidential terms.

Grey Goose and the Thirty-Minute Consent

Bruce Bakerman served as chief legal counsel to Sidney Frank Importing Company and owned five percent of Grey Goose LLC — the holding company above the French entity controlling the vodka's production process and formula rights. He held no equity in the importing company itself.

When Bacardi agreed to acquire the Grey Goose business for approximately $2.25 billion in cash, with a possible earnout of up to $300 million, the draft allocation directed roughly $2.24 billion to Sidney Frank Importing Company and about $11 million — less than one-half of one percent of the cash price — to the French production entity, even though that entity controlled the production assets and important rights. Because Bakerman's five percent sat in Grey Goose LLC rather than the importing company, the allocation largely bypassed his ownership.

On June 18, 2004, Bakerman was asked to sign a unanimous written consent authorizing the sale. The complaint alleged he was given less than thirty minutes and three choices: sign, keep his job, and receive $700,000; sign, resign, and receive $1 million; or refuse, be fired, and face a lawsuit. He signed after being told his consent had to be unqualified. Three weeks after closing, the company terminated him and requested a comprehensive release, which he refused.

The Court of Chancery sustained the central fiduciary, contract, and economic-duress theories, finding sufficient allegations that the allocation had been withheld until the eleventh hour, that conflicted managers had not supplied material information, and that employment and litigation threats could have coerced the consent. The case later settled. Tsai's presentation connected the three moving parts — Bakerman's five-percent LLC interest, the disputed allocation, and the conditions surrounding the written consent — into a single account of how a fiduciary squeeze works in real time.

The Renren Direct-Pay Settlement

Reid Collins & Tsai served as lead counsel in the Renren derivative litigation in New York, where minority investors alleged that insiders of the Chinese social-media company transferred valuable investments — including an interest in the company that became SoFi — to entities they controlled at an unfair valuation.

The defense was built on geography and corporate form: challenges to New York jurisdiction and to derivative standing under Cayman Islands law. In March 2021, the Appellate Division affirmed denial of dismissal, holding that the alleged transactions had a sufficient New York connection and that the complaint adequately pleaded fraud conferring standing under Cayman law. Two months later, after plaintiffs alleged that approximately twenty-two million SoFi shares had been sold while information about the transferred assets remained incomplete, the trial court granted an attachment requiring identification of the shares' owners or the location of the proceeds.

The parties announced a direct-pay settlement of at least $300 million in October 2021. Before approval, the court required broader inclusion of minority shareholders, a corrected record date, and revised treatment of unclaimed funds; the revised agreement used June 21, 2018 — the closing date of the disputed transaction — as the relevant date for derivative standing. On June 9, 2022, the court approved the amended $300 million direct-pay settlement. Appeals were withdrawn, the judgment became effective in October, and the settlement account was funded.

A derivative recovery ordinarily belongs to the corporation whose claim is asserted; this court-approved arrangement directed the proceeds to the eligible minority shareholders and ADS holders themselves. Tsai and the firm's lead-counsel team carried the matter from the jurisdiction and standing rulings and the attachment order through revision of the direct-pay terms, final approval, effective judgment, and funding.

Investigation and Case Selection

Tsai's matters often begin long before a complaint, with public filings, transaction documents, engagement letters, valuation work, and available communications assembled and stress-tested. Forensic accountants and industry specialists probe causation, damages, and the anticipated defenses. Tsai participates in the decisions that shape everything after: the provable theory, the expert needs, the available remedy, the staffing, and the expected path through trial or settlement.

Building Reid Collins & Tsai

Tsai is the daughter of Chinese immigrants, grew up without knowing a single lawyer, and planned to become a broadcast journalist. Law school was never the plan — and then it became the vehicle for everything the original plan was about: finding out what actually happened and telling it so people understand.

She graduated from Princeton University with highest honors in politics and earned her law degree with honors from the University of Texas, where she was elected to the Order of the Coif and published in the Texas Law Review. After a federal clerkship in the Southern District of Texas, she practiced at Latham & Watkins in Los Angeles before moving to plaintiff-side commercial litigation.

In 2009, she joined William Reid, Jason Collins, Eric Madden, and other colleagues in founding Reid Collins & Tsai. Nine lawyers made the move. By the time she became managing partner in September 2021 — one of only a handful of minority women leading prominent American law firms — the firm had grown into a national trial boutique with offices in Austin, Dallas, New York, Washington, and Wilmington, and Tsai had accumulated multiple eight- and nine-figure verdicts and judgments before the age of forty. As managing and hiring partner, she helps decide which matters the firm pursues, how teams are staffed, and when younger lawyers receive trial responsibility — and she has kept the firm's bedrock compensation tenet that when recoveries come in, every lawyer and employee shares in them.

Her professional service runs deep: chair of the State Bar of Texas Asian Pacific Interest Section, whose highest honor — the Justice David Wellington Chew Award — she later received; president of the Austin Asian American Bar Association; chair of the Austin Bar Association's Bench Bar Committee; vice chair of Austin's Ethics Review Commission; a decade as founding board member, and board secretary, of the Texas Fair Defense Project; and trustee of the University of Texas Law School Foundation. She received the Judge Suzanne Covington Pro Bono Service Award for her legal work on behalf of domestic-violence survivors, and the Travis County Women Lawyers' Association named her a Pathfinder. She mentors first-year law students, and she raises four boys with, by her own account, the same diligence, grace, and humor she brings to the firm.

Tsai has described professional endurance in direct terms: lawyers need to find work that genuinely motivates them. Hers, she says, is helping people right their wrongs.