Paul Grewal (full name: Paul Singh Grewal) is currently Chief Legal Officer at Coinbase. Previously Grewal was Vice President and Deputy General Counsel at Facebook, and is also a former U.S. Magistrate Judge for the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California.
Education
Grewal received his Bachelor of Science in Civil and Environmental Engineering in 1993 from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he was elected to Tau Beta Pi and Sigma Xi Grewal then obtained his Juris Doctor (J.D.) degree from the University of Chicago in 1996.
Career
Upon graduation from law school, Grewal served as a judicial law clerk to the Honorable Sam H. Bell of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Ohio. After his clerkship, he joined the law firm of Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman LLP (then known as Pillsbury, Madison & Sutro LLP), primarily practicing complex commercial litigation. After working at Pillsbury, Grewal then served as a judicial law clerk to the Honorable Arthur Gajarsa of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit.
After his clerkship with Judge Gajarsa, Grewal joined the law firm of Day Casebeer Madrid & Batchelder (which later merged with and became Howrey LLP, which he was a part of), where he became a partner and served on the firm's management committee, and where his practice focused on intellectual property litigation and patent litigation, with an emphasis on federal patent trials in district courts across the country and appellate work at a variety of federal appellate courts, including the Federal Circuit. In private practice, Grewal was also a registered patent attorney admitted to practice before the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office, and he performed re-examinations for his clients, which included independent inventors and companies in the high-technology, biotechnology, medical device, and financial firm/service spaces
Grewal was a former president of the South Asian Bar of Northern California and the Northern American South Asian Bar Association. In 2010, Grewal was named as a "Best Lawyer Under 40" by the National Asian Pacific American Bar Association (NAPABA).
Magistrate Judge Service
On December 1, 2010, Grewal was sworn in as a U.S. Magistrate Judge for the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California. At that time, he was only the second sitting South Asian Federal Magistrate Judge in the United States. While a judge on that court, Grewal sat on the Northern District's Technology Practice and Patent Instructions and Rules Committees. Judge Grewal was also appointed by U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts to the Federal Judicial Center’s Magistrate Judge Education Committee and served as a co-chair of the Federal Circuit Bar Association’s Judges Committee.
Facebook
On May 12, 2016, The Recorder reported that Judge Grewal would leave the bench in June 2016 to join Facebook as their Vice President and Deputy General Counsel. Judge Grewal retired from the bench on June 3, 2016.
He joined Facebook as the company's Vice President and Deputy General Counsel in June 2016.
Coinbase
On July 9, 2020, it was announced that Grewal would replace Brian Brooks as Chief Legal Officer at Coinbase, a cryptocurrency exchange.
