Charles Sipos '94

Associate, Perkins Coie LLP

Charles Sipos ’94 didn’t give law school serious thought until his senior year at Puget Sound, but that’s not to say the interest in law and litigation wasn’t there. A communication major, he graduated just one course shy of a second major in politics and government. Those extra classes served him well at his first job out of college—a document clerk at Perkins Coie, Seattle’s largest law firm.

In 1995 Charles accepted a position with Y.S. Chang and Associates in Seoul, South Korea, serving as the firm’s director of international operations until the following year, when he returned to the Northwest and rejoined Perkins as a paralegal. Spreading his wings once again four years later, Charles relocated to Nashville, Tenn., to attend Vanderbilt University Law School. Making the move with him was his wife Nicole ’94, a politics and government major at Puget Sound who now works as a process manager for Washington Mutual. While at Vanderbilt, Charles served as associate editor of Vanderbilt Law Review and earned several honors for legal writing and scholastic excellence, including the 2002 Dean’s Award, recognizing the faculty-judged best research and writing project in the graduating class.

After receiving his J.D. in May 2002, Charles once again returned to Seattle and Perkins Coie, this time as an associate. Since that time he has worked on a number of high-profile cases, specializing in intellectual property and constitutional litigation. In 2006 Charles was a member of the legal team that successfully represented Salim Ahmed Hamdan in the landmark case Hamdan v. Rumsfeld.

Major: Communication
Public Service: Charles is a recipient of awards from The National Law Journal, the King County Bar Association, and the Japanese American Bar Association for his pro bono legal work.
Rising Star: Washington Law & Politics magazine named Charles a Rising Star in 2006 and 2007.
Staying Connected: “I graduated almost 14 years ago,” Charles says, “and the friends I still see on a regular basis—the people most important in my life—are fellow graduates from Puget Sound.”

Photo by Ross Mulhausen