Coates Lear

Member

coateslear@sgslitigation.com
303-530-3452 x 7

Coates Lear helps companies, board committees, and individuals navigate regulatory and internal investigations, compliance challenges, and related litigation. A former Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) enforcement lawyer, Coates has investigated and defended cases involving a wide range of issues, including financial reporting, securities offerings, audit practices, asset management, anti-money laundering compliance, foreign corruption, whistleblower protection rules, and insider trading. His clients have included public companies, audit committees, broker-dealers, investment advisers, audit professionals, and corporate officers, directors, and compliance personnel.

Coates maintains a national practice. In recent years, he has represented clients in investigative and litigation matters across the country, including inquiries by numerous SEC offices, the U.S. Department of Justice, the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board (PCAOB), the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA), and state regulators. He has been quoted in the Wall Street Journal, Law360, and The Anti-Corruption Report, among other publications, and has presented on SEC enforcement issues at a variety of forums.

In each case, Coates seeks to gain an early understanding of the client’s unique situation and objectives, identify the factual and legal issues that are likely to drive the outcome, and build a strategy around those objectives and issues. He has a keen interest in litigation technology and electronic discovery tools and looks for ways to use such tools to identify and synthesize key evidence as efficiently as possible. A native of Washington, DC, Coates began his career as a litigator in the DC office of Hogan & Hartson (now Hogan Lovells). After catching the Colorado bug in 2001, he joined Hogan’s Denver office, where he worked on several high-stakes litigation and white-collar matters — and met his now-SGS colleagues, Andrew Shoemaker and Cindy Mitchell. Before reuniting with Andrew and Cindy at SGS in 2021, Coates was a partner in the Government Investigations & White-Collar group at the international law firm of Squire Patton Boggs.

Representative Matters

Coates’ experience (including prior to joining SGS) includes:

• Representing the broker-dealer subsidiary of a large retirement plan service provider in an SEC investigation into potential violations of broker-dealer AML rules

• Representing multiple audit professionals in a PCAOB investigation concerning alteration of audit documentation and cooperation with a PCAOB inspection

• Representing a video-streaming company in an SEC investigation concerning non-GAAP disclosures and compliance with SEC whistleblower protection rules

• Representing a manufacturing company in an SEC investigation into financial reporting and internal control issues, including inventory cost accounting, lease accounting, and journal entry controls

• Conducting an internal investigation on behalf of an investment advisory firm into potential misuse of client assets and representing the firm in a related SEC investigation

• Representing an investment adviser’s chief compliance officer in an SEC investigation into potential supervision and compliance program failures

• Conducting an internal investigation on behalf of a public company audit committee into potentially improper securities trading by the company’s CEO