Flowers Keller LLP is a firm of former public defenders from the country’s best public defender offices. Each lawyer is dedicated to the same mission—defend the accused, vindicate the convicted, and change the system.
Our time as public defenders strengthened our commitment to this mission and deepened our understanding of client-centered lawyering. During those formative years, we received excellent training from top-notch lawyers, social workers, actors, writers, and others. We also experienced nearly every type of case in the criminal law. We’ve taken that training and experience to both teach others and create a cadre of lawyers ready to meet the mission.
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.
Admitted to the State Bar of California. Application to the District of Columbia Bar pending.
Kobie is, first and foremost, a trial lawyer, with over twenty-five years of courtroom experience. Kobie has litigated cases in federal and state courts throughout the United States and in the military commissions in Guantanamo Bay. He represents clients in high-stakes criminal investigations, civil litigation, internal investigations, and trials. Recognized by his peers for his trial acumen, Kobie teaches the art and science of trial lawyering to other lawyers around the country.
Kobie began his career as a member of the Attorney General’s Honors Program, where he was as a civil rights prosecutor in the U.S. Department of Justice, Civil Rights Division, Criminal Section. There, he specialized in the prosecution of police brutality cases. Kobie never lost a case at the Department of Justice. That is notable because police brutality cases are arguably the hardest to prosecute in the federal criminal law.
Following his time as a federal civil rights prosecutor, Kobie pursued the challenge of defending people against federal prosecutions as an Assistant Federal Public Defender in Maryland. In that role, he adeptly represented people accused of federal felonies. He won two-thirds of his trials. That is unusual. When trial was not his client’s expressed interest, Kobie skillfully secured several advantageous pre-verdict results, including case dismissals.
Founding Flowers Keller LLP is the capstone of Kobie’s decades-long commitment to ending Mass Incarceration. From helping people warehoused in California’s prisons in his teens to writing his college honors thesis on ending Mass Incarceration in his twenties to holding law enforcement criminally accountable in his thirties to holding these same people civilly accountable in his forties, Kobie’s commitment to ending Mass Incarceration spans a lifetime.
In the words of another former federal public defender and now Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, “History speaks.” In 2003, Kobie was one of the prosecutors who successfully tried the largest prosecution of federal correctional officers in the history of the Civil Rights Division. By 2023, he spearheaded the settlement of the largest wrongful conviction case in American history. That history of fighting to end Mass Incarceration is what Kobie brings to his advocacy for the wrongly accused and the wrongly convicted.
Doug has spent most of his career focused on appellate litigation. He has represented hundreds of clients on appeal in civil and criminal cases. He has also spent significant time in trial courts arguing dispositive motions and advising trial attorneys about how best to preserve issues for appeal. He regularly leads trainings on various topics related to appellate litigation, legal writing, and the intersection of the immigration system and the criminal legal system.
Early in his career, after working in the appellate section for a global law firm, Doug clerked for the Honorable Thomas Reavley of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, a wonderful mentor and judge.
He later spent two years as a fellow in the Appellate Litigation Clinic at Georgetown University Law Center where he supervised law students working on civil appeals. He also oversaw his own caseload. Among the cases he handled was In re Contempt Finding in United States v. Stevens, 663 F.3d 1270 (D.C. Cir. 2011), in which he successfully defended the trial court’s judgment holding prosecutors involved with the prosecution of the late Senator Ted Stevens in contempt for serious discovery violations and prosecutorial misconduct.
Doug also spent nearly a decade as an appellate attorney at Federal Defenders of San Diego—a training ground for the entire federal public defender system. During his time there, Doug regularly appeared before the Ninth Circuit on behalf of the accused. Among his most notable successes was United States v. Corrales-Vazquez, 931 F.3d 944 (9th Cir. 2019), a case dealing with the crime of illegal entry. Doug persuaded the Ninth Circuit that the government had been using an improperly expansive interpretation of a portion of the illegal-entry statute. Following the victory, the government had to vacate approximately 500 wrongful convictions that were then pending on appeal. Doug also filed the successful petition for certiorari in Tapia v. United States, 564 U.S. 319 (2011), where the Supreme Court held that a district court could not impose a longer custodial sentence on a federal criminal defendant for the purpose of rehabilitation. Tapia has since helped countless defendants receive lower prison sentences.
Before founding Flowers Keller LLP, Doug spent three years as the Legal Director at the Lone Star Defenders Office in Texas. While there, Doug helped lead an office that is the indigent defense hub for Operation Lone Star—Texas’s multi-billion-dollar misadventure using state law to try to regulate immigration. Doug spearheaded numerous constitutional challenges to this unjust system. Based on arguments he devised, six judges in five counties declared the system unconstitutional. As the Legal Director, he also mentored and trained some of the brightest lawyers in Texas. For his efforts, his peers recognized him with the 2025 Champion of Indigent Defense Award.
Doug has published articles and contributed to treatises. Courts, commentators, and litigants have cited his publications. Those publications include: