Colin Gillespie
Colin represents people and businesses in complex disputes with a government or regulatory dimension.
In a wide variety of actions on behalf of plaintiffs, his practice focuses on matters where the hard question is often not whether the client was wronged, but where and how the wrong can be vindicated. Alongside his plaintiffs’ practice, Colin maintains a commercial litigation practice for businesses and individuals and takes appropriate referrals from larger firms on matters involving conflicts or rate constraints.
He currently represents consumers in a putative class action in the U.S. Court of International Trade arising from the unlawful IEEPA tariffs, seeking to ensure that tariff refunds reach the customers who actually bore their cost rather than becoming a corporate windfall. The case is among the first of its kind: while consumer suits over tariff refunds have been filed in district courts around the country, this action proceeds in the specialized court with exclusive jurisdiction over the tariffs themselves. It has been covered by the trade press here.
Prior to joining Farra & Wang, Colin spent eight years at an elite litigation firm representing clients in high-stakes commercial disputes across a variety of industries, including private equity, industrial manufacturing, biotech, venture capital, and fine art. His successes include a Delaware Supreme Court reversal of a trial-court ruling that had assigned legacy environmental liabilities to his clients, and a favorable settlement for a private equity fund in investor litigation, which he then defended against collateral attacks from objecting class members. Prior to his general commercial litigation work, he litigated human rights cases under the Alien Tort Statute, including before the United States Supreme Court; clerked for the late Judge Rosemary S. Pooler of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit; and served as a Lecturer-in-Law at Peking University School of Transnational Law in Shenzhen. He was named as a Rising Star by Superlawyers every year from 2020-2025.
He is a co-founder of the Small Law Initiative, a quarterly gathering of litigators at boutique firms. He also serves as Secretary of the Board of the Rockaway Film Festival.
In his career, Colin has represented homeless New Yorkers, dissident religious minorities, CECOT detainees, consumers, investors, unicorn founders, and billionaires.
He lives in Brooklyn.
District of Columbia
New York
U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York
U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York
U.S. Court of International Trade
J.D., New York University School of Law (2011) (Magna cum laude; Order of the Coif)
B.A., Northwestern University (2006)
Quinn Emanuel, New York, New York
Judge Rosemary Pooler, U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit
Colin's Representative Cases
Cox and Russell v. e.l.f. Cosmetics, Inc. (Ct. Int'l Trade)
The IEEPA tariffs imposed costs across the economy, largely on consumers. e.l.f. Cosmetics sued the U.S. government for a full refund of the tariffs it paid — and after the Supreme Court struck the tariffs down, that money is coming. But e.l.f. passed the cost of those tariffs on to its customers, so keeping the entire refund for itself would be a big windfall. On behalf of two of those customers, we intervened in e.l.f.’s case in the U.S. Court of International Trade and filed a class action, demanding that e.l.f. pay the refund to the people who actually paid the tariffs rather than pocketing it.
Blanco Bonilla et al. v. CSI Aviation, Inc. et al. (D.D.C.)
In March 2025, three chartered planes carried more than 230 Venezuelan men out of Texas. The men had been told they were going home to Venezuela. Instead they were flown to El Salvador and locked in CECOT, a prison whose own officials boasted that no one leaves alive, where they were held incommunicado for four months and, they allege, beaten and tortured. A federal judge ordered the flights halted and the planes returned. They went to El Salvador anyway. We represent three of those men in a class action against the two aviation companies that flew them, CSI Aviation and GlobalX.
