Dan Wall, ’80

Partner at Latham Watkins

If trial lawyers suffer an image stereotype that makes them an easy mark for political vitriol and comedy fodder alike, Santa Clara alums who have become leading litigators don’t let it sway their conviction that everyone going to court deserves a lawyer, and a tough one at that. Take Dan Wall ’80, the former antitrust litigator for the Justice Department who turned the tables on his old employer last year to wallop the government in its antitrust suit against Wall’s client, Oracle. It’s not every day that an attorney beats Washington’s legal stable, and Wall’s victory wowed the legal world, winning the National Law Journal’s nod for top defense win of the year—“deft lawyering by Wall and two colleagues,” the magazine called it.

“It’s not very often that companies fight the Justice Department on these matters,” Wall says. “It used to be that they (the government) most always won. It was lunacy to fight them. In recent years it’s become more of a horse race.” And for his money, it’s a race well worth running: “I think a lot of companies made some wrong decisions in caving on these cases over the years.”

A partner in Latham Watkins’ San Francisco office, Wall has represented such giants as Genentech, Intel, Compaq, and Eastman Kodak. He traces his antitrust specialization to a law school class taught by George Alexander. The topic, he decided, “had the intellectual depth and the analytics that made it a good mind puzzle. I liked that openended- facts-and-circumstances kind of inquiry because it gave a lot of opportunity for creativity.” Strong courtroom technique, he says, is akin to teaching. “Good teachers are patient. They start at the beginning, not the middle…. You have to start basic and have the patience to build stories from the elemental to the more sophisticated, and you have to do it in plain language, simple examples.”