Zachary D. Smith

Zachary assists clients with litigation matters involving trademarks, government contracts, employment disputes, election and campaign finance issues, and other commercial disputes.

He has recently helped several international companies both defend and pursue trademark and trade dress infringement claims in federal court. For government contracts, Zachary helped defend a family business against an Oracle audit request, a business from the federal government’s rejection of payment requests, and a publicly traded company in interpreting state laws prohibiting certain business activities in foreign countries. In the employment realm, he helped defend a publicly traded company from contract claims by a former officer and contributed to internal company investigations to determine any wrongdoing by current and former employees. Zachary has also helped defend a private university from election law violation claims as well as provided advice to campaigns on federal campaign finance regulations.

Zachary is one of the few practicing attorneys with experience using corpus linguistics, a cutting-edge legal tool that looks at large data sets of word usage to interpret statutes, regulations, contracts, trademarks, patents, and other legal documents. Additionally, he has used his experience in statistics and quantitative analysis to explain and challenge complex regression models in simple terms for a trial.

Zachary has spent time, pro bono, defending families in the DC Landlord Tenant Court, including one from eviction proceedings, and has served at DC’s Legal Aid.