S. Gardner Culpepper III

S. Gardner Culpepper III is recognized as one of Atlanta’s most experience litigators and trial lawyers with years of experience advising plaintiffs and defendants in a wide array of complex commercial and business tort disputes. He is also a member of Smith Gambrell’s Alternative Fee Committee, which works with clients to establish risk sharing fee structures in plaintiff’s cases.

Gardner’s experiences include representing clients in disputes involving fiduciary duties, trade secret misappropriation, false advertising, class actions (defense), insurance coverage (policy holder side), tortious interference, defamation, misrepresentation and fraud, products liability, breach of warranties and high-value contracts.  He also spent much of his career as national counsel for a manufacturing client, successfully defending against multiple statewide putative consumer class actions filed across the eastern United States and involving breach of warranty and product liability claims.

Gardner has successfully pursued numerous commercial plaintiffs’ cases across a wide array of disciplines, including recovering tens of millions of dollars for corporate clients asserting claims for failure to honor buy-side representation and warranty insurance policy claims, breach of contract, and fraud.

Gardner also has extensive experience seeking and resisting TROs and other injunctive relief, and his engagements routinely place him in state and federal court as well as before arbitration panels (including before the International Chamber of Commerce).

Gardner has been frequently recognized over the years as one of Georgia’s top commercial litigators and class action lawyers in third-party publications such as Benchmark Litigation, The Best Lawyers in America^®, and Super Lawyers. He is also a Martindale-Hubbell AV Preeminent Top Rated Lawyer, and ranked by Chambers USA. In 2009, he was identified by Atlanta’s Daily Report as one of the top 12 lawyers under 40 in Atlanta. He also regularly speaks at Georgia CLE’s on ethical and professionalism topics.

Gardner's Practice

Representative Matters

• Recovered $14 million for private equity policyholder under a buy-side representation and warranty policy
• Defeated multi-million dollar contributory false advertising claim brought against professor at one of Georgia’s premiere universities
• Won motions to dismiss in multimillion-dollar putative statewide consumer fraud, breach of warranty, and product liability class actions filed in North Carolina and Florida federal district courts.
• Secured dismissal of $30 million tortious interference and defamation suit filed against an international business communication solutions company.
• Through novel use of the inevitable disclosure doctrine, successfully prevented the threatened misappropriation of trade secrets belonging to a nationally recognized phonetic search technology company.
• Resisted TROs for one of the ‘world’s largest investment banks in non-compete and corporate raiding cases filed in Georgia.
• Co-defense counsel with other large national and international firms representing one of the world’s largest wireless telecommunications companies in multiple international breach of contract and licensing disputes with hundreds of millions of dollars at issue, including two International Chamber of Commerce arbitrations.
• Defeated multiple defamation and business tort cases throughout the Southeast brought against one of the largest telecommunications services providers in the United States.
• Co-defense trial counsel in charge of expert witness cross-examination in murder case tried to completion in Fulton County Superior Court.
• Trial counsel in multiple insurance defense matters where defense verdicts were received.