Meet David P. Shapiro, the Award-Winning San Diego Criminal Defense Attorney Behind David P. Shapiro Criminal Defense Attorneys

The San Diego attorney on second chances, ethics, and why he treats every client as a person first.

Most people meet David P. Shapiro on the worst day of their lives. As a longtime San Diego criminal defense attorney, he spends his days standing beside people who have been arrested, charged, or investigated, those who are frightened and unsure of what comes next. He understands the feeling better than most, because long before he built his firm, he was in the same position himself.

In 2004, while in law school, Shapiro was arrested for a crime he has openly acknowledged committing. He remembers the fear and the uncertainty clearly, and he credits that experience with shaping both the attorney and the person he became. It taught him that the people caught up in the justice system are rarely the worst thing they have been accused of. Most of them, he will tell you, are good people facing the hardest moment of their lives.

That belief became the foundation of a career. Shapiro began practicing criminal defense in San Diego in 2007 and opened his own firm, David P. Shapiro Criminal Defense Attorneys, in 2010. Nearly two decades later, it has grown into one of the city’s established criminal defense practices, but the guiding idea has not changed.

“I am far more than a criminal defense attorney. My greatest passion has always been creating an everlasting impact to the San Diego community beyond criminal defense.”

Ask Shapiro what sets the firm apart, and he does not begin with dismissals or not guilty verdicts, despite there being plenty of those too. He begins with clarity. He is careful never to promise an outcome, something he considers both impossible and unethical, but he does promise that clients will leave their first conversation understanding exactly what they are facing. In a profession the public often views with suspicion, that kind of straight talk is the whole point.

It is a philosophy that has earned outside recognition. In 2022, the Better Business Bureau named the firm a Torch Award for Ethics winner, a distinction reserved for businesses built on the highest levels of community trust and integrity. For a criminal defense firm, it is a point of particular pride.

If a single thread runs through Shapiro’s life outside the courtroom, it is second chances. In addition to the Firm’s significant financial contributions to those impacted directly by the criminal justice system, over the years, David has also raised money for the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society, supported San Diego native and NBA star Norman Powell’s Understand the Grind Foundation, and sponsored youth sports, literacy initiatives, and community events across San Diego County.

The accolades have followed. Shapiro has been named to the San Diego Business Journal’s SD500 list of the region’s 500 most influential people three times (2022, 2024, 2025), has been selected as a Super Lawyer eleven times since 2015, and holds Martindale-Hubbell’s highest peer rating for both legal ability and ethical standards. He tends to mention these almost in passing. What he returns to, again and again, is the work itself and the people it reaches.

A proud husband and father who grew up in New York and lived in New Orleans, making San Diego his home for good in 2006, Shapiro measures success less by any single case than by the difference the firm makes, both in a client’s life and in the community around it. Defending someone and helping them rebuild, in his view, have always been two halves of the same job.

“At the end of the day,” he says, “this work has always been about the people. Everything else follows from that.”