Lissette Duran is a Counsel in the Litigation Department. Her practice focuses on workplace and government investigations and compliance. She has extensive experience conducting employment litigation and sustainability risk assessments and advising on remediation efforts across the technology, financial services, media, education, healthcare, and nonprofit sectors. Lissette has experience leading complex, multi-jurisdictional investigations and advising on cross-border strategy, particularly relating to sustainability risks and human capital management. She also maintains a significant immigration pro bono practice, representing clients in naturalization, asylum and Special Immigrant Juvenile Status applications, as well as release and family reunification efforts.
Lissette has spent her private practice career at Paul, Weiss, beginning as a Summer Associate and returning to the firm full-time after law school. Early in her career, she worked on complex litigation, patent, and regulatory defense matters, representing major companies across the financial services, natural resources, government and technology sectors. She also completed a secondment with a leading financial institution, where she advised on litigation, copyright, sanctions, employment, and policy matters.
Lissette has represented several companies in a variety of workplace investigations, risk assessments and internal reviews, and litigation including:
- BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager, in a high-profile review concerning the handling of internal complaints of discrimination and harassment;
- The Board of Directors of Consumer Reports in an independent investigation into issues impacting the organization’s workplace culture;
- A prominent university in an internal investigation arising out of allegations of sexual misconduct by a physician, resulting in extensive measures designed to improve and enhance the reporting, investigation and response to allegations of sexual misconduct;
- Citigroup in the resolution of a major multi-year global AML investigation by the DOJ, in which the company entered into a non-prosecution agreement and its subsidiary paid a significantly reduced penalty;
- Glencore International in the dismissal of a multibillion-dollar antitrust, fraud and corruption lawsuit brought against international oil trading companies by a U.S. litigation trust allegedly established by Venezuela’s national oil company, Petróleos de Venezuela, S.A. (PDVSA), alleging that the oil trading companies conspired to obtain inside information about tenders for the sale and purchase of oil and oil products; and
- Nichia Corporation in the enforcement of its patent rights to white LEDs in ongoing nationwide litigations against multiple alleged infringers. In related USPTO challenges, the PTAB declined to institute IPR proceedings on four petitions brought by one of the alleged infringers.
From 2016 to 2017, Lissette served as a law clerk to the Honorable Edgardo Ramos of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York. Following her clerkship, she returned to Paul, Weiss and rejoined the Litigation Department.
During law school, Lissette was a member of the Columbia Law Review and served as Sidebar Editor.
