Practices

• Business & Commercial Litigation
• Intellectual Property

Biography

Drew’s practice encompasses a range of complex litigation and transactional matters assisting clients from Fortune 500 companies to start ups.

He helps public entities and quasi-public entities acquire the property they need to maintain and augment infrastructure. Equally skilled at resolving disputes through pre-litigation negotiation and active litigation, Drew has represented diverse entities throughout the State of California on projects for cities, school districts, and public utilities involving the acquisition of fee and easement interests. In addition, he has represented individual property owners in eminent domain litigation.

Drew regularly works with public utilities to obtain necessary real property rights for infrastructure projects, including construction of new substations, expansion of existing substations, new and existing transmission and distribution lines, both overhead and underground. In one such representation, he assisted one of California’s most prominent public and investor-owned electric utilities in upgrading electrical infrastructure at a U.S. Marine base. The Project included acquisition of new right of way between an existing substation and a newly constructed substation for the construction of a new, customer-dedicated, 115/33kV substation. The new right of way covered approximately 10 miles. As lead eminent domain counsel on the project, Drew was instrumental in securing easements on all parcels before appraisal exchange.

Drew also has experience obtaining underground utility rights, and helped an electrical utility secure rights for the approximately 3.7 miles of a first-of-its-kind 500 kV underground transmission line as well as an underground pipe easement to secure drainage rights for a 1,050-megawatt facility designed to provide backup power for more than 700,000 homes.

For over five years, Drew was seconded to Southern California Edison, where he was responsible for a broad range of corporate and dispute matters. In one notable case, he helped litigate with an organic avocado farmer claiming leaked transformer fluid on his orchard rendered inorganic his entire crop. The case was settled for a fraction of the farmer’s claim.

In addition to his eminent domain and real estate work, Drew regularly advises startups and other entities on business formation and structure, trademark and other intellectual property issues, and real estate transactions and disputes.

Drew received his undergraduate degree at Princeton University, where he was a four-year letterman for Men’s Water Polo and a four-time Academic All-America honoree. Drew obtained his law degree at Loyola Law School, Los Angeles, and served on the Entertainment Law Review.