Sarika J. Angulo-Velázquez has a wealth of experience in a wide range of complex civil litigation cases at the trial and appellate levels in both state and federal jurisdictions. While she has successfully won “bet-the-company” civil trials as a key member of the legal team, she prides herself on having a track record of dismissing cases at the pretrial stages of litigation, saving her clients both money and time.
Prior to joining the firm, she acted as in-house counsel to the leading manufacturer of cannabis-infused products in Puerto Rico, where she provided sophisticated transactional, financial, regulatory, and legal advice on matters including but not limited to federal and state regulations, intellectual property, tax, employment, and other general corporate matters.
After graduating law school, she served as law clerk to the Hon. Ulysses G. Thibodeaux, Chief Judge on the Third Circuit Court of Appeals, State of Louisiana. During her one-year tenure she performed extensive legal research and analysis on a myriad of complex issues to prepare drafts of both published and unpublished appellate court opinions. She also drafted bench memoranda and routinely attended oral arguments.
Some of her representative cases to date are:
- March 2016, she second-chaired a week-long jury trial representing plaintiff, a local distributor, in an action for the termination of an exclusive distribution agreement without just cause by the defendant, a nationwide supplier of construction equipment, in violation of Puerto Rico’s Dealer and Franchise Statute. The jury rendered a final verdict in favor of the plaintiff in the amount of $1,763,934.00, plus post-judgment interest at the time of payment.
- January 2018, she second-chaired a bench trial representing defendant, a local distributor, in a breach of contract action by plaintiff, a local subsidiary of a global communications and advertising agency. The judge rendered a final verdict in favor of defendant, along with an attorney’s fee award. All subsequent appeals were likewise won by the defendant.
- Successfully represented plaintiff, a Medicare Advantage Organization, in a motion for contempt where the court found in plaintiff’s favor, holding that contempt sanctions in the form of an adverse inference instruction to the jury and attorneys’ fees were warranted in light of defendant’s intentional spoliation of electronic evidence and contemptuous behavior in plaintiff’s underlying action where it alleged that defendant unlawfully accessed, downloaded, and transmitted confidential information in violation of the consultant agreement executed by the parties, and federal and state statutes. Interestingly, this case is part of island-wide CLE curriculums on spoliation of evidence.
