Paul has dedicated his career to defending the rights of the accused in state and federal court, as both a trial and appellate attorney. He has represented hundreds of clients facing a wide array of criminal charges, from misdemeanor immigration offenses to capital murder. Paul has also presented trainings on a range of trial skills and written chapters of Defending a Federal Criminal Case, a nationally renowned treatise for federal criminal law practitioners.
Paul began his legal career as a fellow with the Equal Justice Initiative in Montgomery, Alabama, representing people the State had sentenced to death. There he wrote briefs on direct appeal to the state appellate courts, worked on habeas petitions to the federal court, and prepared numerous petitions for certiorari to the U.S. Supreme Court.
Immediately before joining Flowers Keller LLP, Paul spent nearly two decades as an Assistant Federal Public Defender with the Federal Defenders of San Diego. He spent most of his time as a trial attorney, representing clients facing charges including human and drug smuggling, immigration offenses, firearms offenses, bank robbery, and mail and wire fraud. He tried more than twenty felony cases to verdict during that time.
Paul also spent years at Federal Defenders working as an appellate attorney. He has filed briefs with the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in dozens of cases and argued before that court nine times. Among his most notable successes was United States v. Soto-Zuniga, 837 F.3d 992 (9th Cir. 2016), where the Ninth Circuit reversed a conviction because the government had (among other things) failed to turn over sufficient information relevant to the constitutionality of a Border Patrol checkpoint. Soto-Zuniga is regarded as the key case on how to obtain discovery relevant to challenging the legality of immigration checkpoints. Paul also obtained another reversal in United States v. Alcantara-Castillo, 788 F.3d 1186 (9th Cir. 2015), successfully arguing that the government had committed serious misconduct during its cross-examination of the accused and during closing argument.