Aligned Spirits

In the early 2000s, when Carrie Bonnington first started at her firm, she says, “I didn’t even know the beverage regulatory practice existed.”

Now, the 47-year-old partner at Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman’s Sacramento office is known for her expertise in the food and beverage area, particularly concerning alcohol regulatory matters. She leads the firm’s wine, beer, and spirits law practice, and co-leads the restaurant, food, and beverage industry team—where she helps companies stay in compliance with laws relating to advertising, ownership, activations and events.

“The law is very complicated, and not intuitive, yet the facts and the people involved are what you see on an everyday basis: You see restaurants, you see wineries, you see the entertainment centers, you see the industries members,” Bonnington says.

At the University of the Pacific’s McGeorge School of Law, she loved her practical skills classes, and after a stint as a summer associate at Pillsbury in 2002, she returned to the firm after graduation to litigate commercial civil cases. During her third year at Pillsbury, a senior colleague reached out for help with an administrative hearing in connection with the firm’s beverage regulatory practice. “It was a little unusual for a junior associate at a big firm to have had experience with administrative hearings, arbitrations and depositions,” Bonnington says, “but I was very lucky to have worked on the cases that I did.”

Bonnington was hooked. And when the colleague asked if she’d like to handle all of his wine, beer, and spirits law litigation, she jumped at the chance. “I hadn’t realized the intricacies of the regulatory system,” she says. “I learned over the next year or two that even just handling the litigation side, you are so much more effective if you really understood the regulatory system and that side of the practice. So, after a couple of years, I started to convert my practice to working in the regulatory space.

But little could have prepared Bonnington for the regulatory changes that took place during the COVID-19 pandemic. In the spring of 2020, she was working around the clock while homeschooling her son and daughter, who were then in elementary and pre-K programs. Issues that concerned Bonnington’s clients included how to convert a distillery into making hand sanitizer and what to do with products in restaurants that were forced to shut down. “It was wild,” she says. “Regulators worked very fast and were very flexible to respond. It was great, but it wasn’t necessarily anything we had seen before in the industry. It was unprecedented.”

Today, the focus of Pillsbury’s wine, beer, and spirits law area is more regulatory in nature—though Bonnington still does litigation and corporate work. Current considerations include utilizing AI effectively, and addressing tariffs and regulatory investigations into industry practices. “The industry has become a lot more sophisticated, and the issues are significantly more complicated,” she says.

Bonnington looks back on her first case in the firm’s alcohol beverage law practice fondly; it is still her favorite. “It introduced me to the industry,” she says. “I didn’t know it could be so much fun doing this type of work, and it offered me the opportunity to build a practice that I never anticipated.”

For that reason, she encourages law students to consider the field as more schools offer alcohol beverage industry law classes. Bonnington herself has taught classes at UC Berkeley Law, and she continues to guest lecture on topics like advertising, promotion, and other trade practices.

She also appreciates the camaraderie within the practice area. “For the most part, people in the industry get along really well,” she says. “More often than not, our interests and our clients’ interests are aligned, because we’re trying to make sure people are acting in compliance with industry laws and regulations. That’s a good position to be in.”