Biography

Steven D. Roland heads the Commercial Practices Division of the firm. He is active in the handling of unfair competition, trade secret, licensing, secured transaction, real estate and commercial contract issues for clients in the pharmaceutical, medical device, high tech, communications, manufacturing, real estate and financial institution sectors.

Mr. Roland has arbitrated and tried numerous cases and has regularly appeared before various administrative agencies, including planning commissions, city councils and administrative appeals boards. Mr. Roland's work has involved properties and transactions in numerous states and in England, Canada, Norway and Australia.

Litigation Matters

Mr. Roland’s recent cases have included:

• Mr. Roland represented a national retailer and service company whose major vendor in one business category filed for bankruptcy, interrupting supply chain and potentially severely straining customer relations.  Mr. Roland and a team of civil and bankruptcy attorneys obtained emergency relief during a series of hearings, which allowed the client to obtain release of warehoused products, to take over certain services and to access the vendor’s records, all of which assisted the clients to preserve critical customer relations.
• Mr. Roland represented a national high-rise developer and property manager after a major tenant defaulted on a long-term lease.  Mr. Roland obtained a prejudgment attachment over $48 million of the tenant’s assets.
• Mr. Roland represented a Fortune 500 medical products company who was sued for $77 million for the alleged breach of a licensing and distribution agreement covering a family of medical products. Mr. Roland was able to obtain a successful award after a seven-week binding arbitration before a panel of three arbitrators, by showing that the commercial value of certain products had been grossly reduced as a result of unanticipated regulatory restrictions and that other products showed no scientifically supportable basis for success.
• Mr. Roland represented an international medical products company in the defense of patent infringement and trade secret litigation arising from the development of an anti-microbial wound dressing. The action was resolved successfully on the first day of trial after partial summary judgment was awarded to the client.
• Mr. Roland obtained a victory in the jury trial of quiet title, contract and fraud claims brought by plaintiffs who sought rights to land by adverse possession and $1.4 million in damages. Plaintiffs abandoned their case-in-chief midtrial after Mr. Roland’s cross examination of one of the plaintiffs. The court then entered judgment for Mr. Roland’s clients on their cross-complaint for breach of contract and awarded attorneys’ fees.
• Mr. Roland obtained a fully successful judgment at trial of a dispute between a riverbed sand and gravel mining company and a public entity over vested rights claims and the public entity's effort to modify riverbed mining operations to protect infrastructure and environment.
• On behalf of a large commercial lender, Mr. Roland forged through a series of lender liability claims and anti-deficiency defenses, and obtained judgment in a judicial foreclosure action, including a multimillion-dollar deficiency. The appellate decision is reported at Guardian Savings and Loan v. MD Associates, 64 Cal.App.4th 309 (1998).
• After a five-week jury trial on behalf of a utility client which had condemned an easement for a new transmission line across property zoned for commercial development, the jury returned a verdict in the amount of the client’s pre-trial offer of just compensation and rejected the landowner’s claims for an additional $8 million.

Memberships & Honors

Mr. Roland has served as an arbitrator and settlement panelist for the San Francisco Superior Court and he has been a speaker before the American Bar Association, Association of Defense Counsel, Lloyd's Insurance Market, and corporate counsel, real property and claims groups on litigation management, cost-control methods in complex commercial litigation, alternative dispute resolution, investigative techniques, unfair competition law and issues germane to the financial services industry.

Mr. Roland joined the San Francisco office of Sedgwick in 1982, following clerkships with the California Supreme Court, Honorable Frank Richardson, and the San Francisco Superior Court, Honorable Ira Brown.  While in law school, he was a member of the Law Review.

He is a member of the Bar Association of San Francisco and the Association of Business Trial Lawyers of Northern California, carries an AV designation, and is recognized in Who's Who in American Law and as a "Northern California Super Lawyer." He was recently named by Bay Area Lawyer Magazine as one of the region's top lawyers.