Christopher Wimmer

Christopher Wimmer

Summary

Christopher Wimmer joined Gaw | Poe LLP in August 2025 and has been practicing law since graduating in 2005 from Columbia Law School. He has first-chaired eight trials and arbitrations, argued appeals in the California Courts of Appeal and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, and filed briefs with the Supreme Court of California (as lead merits counsel) and the Supreme Court of the United States (as lead amicus counsel). He has also been lead transactional counsel on commercial, financing, and M&A contracts in the cannabis industry cumulatively worth over $850 million.

Prior to joining Gaw | Poe LLP, Mr. Wimmer spent thirteen years at elite commercial litigation firms in New York and San Francisco and seven years as in-house and external litigation, transactional, and regulatory counsel in the cannabis industry.

While at Columbia Law School, Mr. Wimmer received the Paul R. Hays Prize for civil procedure along with numerous other honors and served as a teaching assistant for the late Jack Greenberg. He also clerked for the late Hon. Jack B. Weinstein. Before attending Columbia, Mr. Wimmer graduated from U.C. Berkeley with a dual degree in Rhetoric (with Honors) and Molecular & Cell Biology. He has been published academically and professionally on a range of topics including litigation publicity and California’s Anti-SLAPP statute, the history of criminal sentencing in the U.S. from the colonial era to present, the Supreme Court’s Seventh Amendment jurisprudence, legal and ethical issues in correctional psychiatry and guardianships, and the Russian novelist Vladimir Nabokov.

Education

Professional Activities

Representative Engagements

• As lead counsel, represented Ukrainian IT services company in breach of contract and employee solicitation claims against its largest customer, a healthcare analytics provider. The claims, valued at over $20 million, settled before trial.
• As sole counsel, successfully represented owners of a cannabis dispensary business through summary judgment in breach of contract claims against their former partners for theft of a license and licensing deal worth over $15 million.
• As senior in-house counsel to a publicly traded ancillary cannabis company, developed SaaS, construction financing, equipment leasing, trademark licensing, and consulting contracts.
• As sole in-house counsel to a publicly traded cannabis multistate operator, led internal investigation into anti-money laundering issues that uncovered significant violations by a competitor, and directed outside counsel in litigation against the competitor that led to a federal indictment of the competitor’s CEO.