Ashlea Schwarz

Ashlea’s practice is driven by the complexity of matters and spans numerous practice areas. Her cases involve multi-faceted commercial litigation—most often with multiple parties. Ashlea excels at fact-intensive, meaningful cases, such as:

– mass actions, where hundreds and thousands of people band together against large corporations to recover for personal injuries, property damage, or financial losses;

– business disputes, such as claims for breach of contract, breach of fiduciary duty, intellectual property and trade secrets, fraud, and misrepresentation;

– large-scale wage and hour collective and class actions on behalf of groups of thousands of employees against some of the largest Fortune 500 companies;

– adversary actions to recover money for bankruptcy estates to pay back creditors after corporate malfeasance has defrauded the masses, including claims for fraudulent transfers, aiding and abetting, breach of fiduciary duties, conspiracy, re-characterizing debt instruments as equity, equitable subordination, products liability, and director/officer liability; and

– Wrongful death actions caused by negligence, complacency, and a failure to care; often times the victims of these atrocious acts are those most in need of our protection, including the mentally ill, low income, and elderly.

Many of Ashlea’s cases are nation-wide litigations where she works with teams of highly regarded co-counsel in multi-district litigations in both state and federal court. Ashlea has managed the day-to-day responsibilities of over 60 class and mass actions.

Recently, Ashlea was part of the leadership teams in mass and class actions against Syngenta Seeds, one of the world’s largest seed manufacturers pending in both the United States District Court for the District of Kansas and Minnesota State Court in Hennepin County. Ashlea represents over 1,000 individual corn farmers and rural elevators who were harmed when the price of corn plummeted after Syngenta released a corn seed that was not approved for export to one of the US’s largest markets—China. In response, China banned all U.S. corn from future import, causing the price of corn to plummet, and injured every corn farmer in America. In addition to her own clients, Ashlea, along with her partner, Rick Paul, oversaw the prosecution of some 50,000 other cases on behalf of farmers, elevators, and exporters pending in Kansas and Minnesota. In September 2017, Paul LLP, along with other leadership firms, settled the claims of all farmers and elevators against Syngenta.

Ashlea has an AV-preeminent rating with Martindale-Hubbell and in 2014 Ashlea was named one of Missouri Lawyers’ Weekly’s Up and Coming Lawyers, an award recognizing litigators under age 40 who demonstrate excellence in the legal profession and in their commitment to their communities. In 2015 and 2016, Ashlea was named a Rising Star by the Kansas City Business Journal. Ashlea has been named as a Kansas and Missouri Super Lawyer in 2015, 2016 and 2017.