Willkie excels in high-stakes litigation, building a preeminent platform that is not only notable for the significance of its cases but the array of disputes and variety of its victories—a true hallmark of a litigation powerhouse.
Willkie’s litigators shine in virtually every type of dispute and venue globally – at the trial and appellate level in state and federal courts as well as the U.S. Supreme Court, before arbitration panels, in bet-the-company lawsuits and pro bono cases. Willkie has been on the front lines of the industry, leading a series of litigations arising from some of the most significant controversies of our time.
Our record underscores Willkie’s trial-ready strengths and demonstrates not only the outstanding advocacy of our litigators but also their ability to strategically achieve their clients’ objectives. Willkie has a distinctive ability to distil complex and contested issues in a compelling way, dissect opponents’ arguments, establish credibility, and execute at trial.
Results like those obtained by Willkie require firepower—intellectual heft, mastery of substantive law and persuasive advocacy—but they are only possible with a culture of collaboration and a commitment to excellence. The range of Willkie’s recent victories attests to the depth and versatility of our litigation department. Unlike other litigation powerhouses, Willkie runs lean, prioritizing the caliber of its attorneys over their number, the potency of its teams over sheer size. The firm trains its litigators to be generalists, giving associates meaningful roles and experience across the gamut of disputes.
Willkie also has a robust arbitration practice, regularly representing clients in both domestic and international arbitration proceedings. Willkie’s arbitration practice ensures continuity of the same high caliber of legal representation for the firm’s clients across the globe.
Complementing our existing robust litigation practice, our Chicago office, led by Craig C. Martin, Chairman, Midwest, brings a new Willkie destination for commercial and business legal matters of strategic, economic and reputational impact. Since opening in March 2020, the office has grown from a team of six partners to more than 100 lawyers. Globally recognized as top-ranked practitioners and as trusted advisors, our attorneys are firmly committed to delivering outstanding client service and to engaging in civic involvement and pro bono work.
In addition, the litigators in Willkie’s Los Angeles office, launched in 2021, bring market-leading experience representing major companies, investors and individual clients in a range of disputes.
Updated March 2025
With over 3,600 lawyers in 14 countries and fluency in 60+ languages, Latham & Watkins offers an unmatched global platform to quickly mobilize the best-suited teams. Our lawyers collaborate across practices and offices to provide proactive, efficient, and commercially savvy counsel, helping clients avoid costly regulatory issues and effectively resolve the most complex disputes.
The Litigation & Trial Department leverages a global platform to provide unmatched legal services. With over 1,100 top-tier litigators, including more than 30 former U.S. federal prosecutors, we bring experience, insight, and determination to every client. Our pragmatic approach ensures favorable results through effective collaboration with local counsel, co-counsel, and government regulators. We develop aggressive and creative litigation strategies, often resolving matters before trial. When necessary, clients can rely on our ability to win at trial, arbitration, regulatory proceedings, and on appeal.
Antitrust & Competition: Our elite team features highly qualified lawyers skilled in local and international antitrust and competition issues. We counsel on merger clearance, cartel investigations, competition-related litigation, IP antitrust, and compliance training. Our team delivers top client service in cases involving monopolization challenges, fast-moving merger litigation, and novel bet-the-company theories.
Complex Commercial Litigation: Our team combines trial-ready capabilities and business fluency to tackle complex challenges. We represent public and private companies, financial institutions, private equity firms, governmental entities, and high net worth individuals in commercial disputes. Over the past decade, we have tried or arbitrated hundreds of cases to verdict with an extraordinary success rate in U.S. federal and state courts and arbitration panels. Our team includes over 350 former federal law clerks and more than 30 former federal prosecutors, providing invaluable institutional knowledge and courtroom experience.
Connectivity, Privacy & Information: Our firm brings together a global team of lawyers addressing the critical legal issues arising from digital technology and services, in disciplines including communications, data privacy and cybersecurity, internet law, and digital copyright. Our team handles high-profile litigation, regulatory investigations and counseling, internal investigations, and technology transactions for clients in multiple industry sectors. We handle matters requiring extensive experience in particular areas of the law governing digital commerce, as well as matters that cut across legal silos to deliver exceptional results for our clients.
Environmental Litigation: We represent clients in administrative and regulatory proceedings, enforcement, litigation, transactions, and legislative matters. We help clients navigate complex agency rulemakings, secure approvals for energy and infrastructure projects, and resolve environmental investigations and compliance issues. Our wide-ranging expertise and unique government experience set us apart, delivering successful outcomes in groundbreaking matters worldwide.
Intellectual Property Litigation: Latham's litigators have unparalleled experience in IP disputes, including patent, trademark, copyright, trade dress, and trade secrets. We engage in multijurisdictional litigation worldwide, including in over 45 U.S. district courts and before the Federal Circuit, ITC, and PTAB. Our team includes 105+ technically trained lawyers, 9 technical analysts, and 17 IP paralegals, handling cases in semiconductors, software, biotechnology, pharmaceuticals, medical devices, electric motors, engines, cloud computing and networking, packaging, building products, and banking technologies, among others.
Securities Litigation & Professional Liability: Our Securities Litigation team has unparalleled experience in complex securities class actions and shareholder derivative litigation. From 2021 onward, we have defended more federal securities lawsuits than any other U.S. firm (Lex Machina). Named Securities Group of the Year by Law360 in 4 of the past 5 years, and consistently ranked #1 by Chambers and The Legal 500, our team includes top lawyers, former federal prosecutors, and senior SEC staff. We are the go-to firm for Fortune 500 companies, major financial institutions, and the Big Four accounting firms, achieving high-profile, precedent-setting wins. We excel at resolving matters before trial through dispositive motions or settlements, and have a proven track record in trial success.
Supreme Court & Appellate: Led by a former U.S. Solicitor General, our Supreme Court and Appellate Practice boasts an outstanding record before the U.S. Supreme Court and other appellate courts. Over the past two decades, our advocates have argued more than 100 cases before the Supreme Court, representing Fortune 100 corporations, state governments, leading educational institutions, and individuals. Recently, we secured certiorari in nearly a dozen cases and have prepared briefs for hundreds of cases in both federal and state appellate courts.
White Collar Defense & Investigations: Latham is at the forefront of advising on white collar and enforcement matters, offering unparalleled expertise in high-profile, sensitive cases globally. We leverage deep experience with regulators and prosecutors to guide clients through inquiries and investigations, skillfully defending against enforcement actions and prosecutions. Our track record includes avoiding charges and achieving full acquittals, often defeating government prosecutions before trial. We represent clients in actions by the SEC, DOJ, PCAOB, FINRA, CFTC, state attorneys general, Congress, and other global regulators. Our team excels in export controls, economic sanctions, and national security-related work, including CFIUS reviews and FOCI mitigation. Our defense lawyers include former senior prosecutors and government officials from top agencies.
Updated Oct 2024
King & Spalding helps leading companies advance complex business interests in more than 160 countries. Working across a highly integrated platform of more than 1,300 lawyers in 24 offices globally, we deliver tailored commercial solutions through world-class offerings and an uncompromising approach to quality and service.
Trial and Global Disputes: Our experienced disputes lawyers try and arbitrate high-stakes cases every year across the globe in the most challenging jurisdictions for corporate clients. Recognized for creativity, meticulous preparation, and top-rate advocacy, our lawyers help clients navigate the litigation lifecycle, working together from day one to identify business objectives, develop a strategy to meet those objectives, and then execute that strategy. With more than 450 lawyers in 17 offices worldwide, we are uniquely able to staff and manage large and cross-border disputes from filing, to trial, and through appeal. Our lawyers have a variety of expertise across substantive areas, including Appellate Law, Class Action Defense, Commercial Litigation, Construction & Engineering Disputes, Corporate & Securities Litigation, E-Discovery, Insolvency Litigation, Insurance Coverage & Recovery, Intellectual Property, International Arbitration, Labor & Employment, Product Liability, Professional Liability, and Toxic & Environmental Torts. Working together—one area of expertise informing another—our disputes lawyers provide clients with seamless and efficient representation in the most complex and sensitive matters.
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Government Matters: Clients ranging from Fortune Global 50 corporations to high-profile individuals in every region of the world entrust King & Spalding’s Government Matters practice to guide them through rapidly changing regulatory landscapes, complex investigations by U.S. and foreign enforcement authorities, highly sensitive internal investigations and related, often parallel civil proceedings.
Hundreds of lawyers across the United States, Europe and Asia bring decades of prior government service and industry experience to our regulatory and investigative practices, which serve the financial services, pharmaceutical and medical device, healthcare, energy, automotive and technology sectors in particular. The team includes six U.S. Attorneys, 24 Assistant U.S. Attorneys, and former senior officials from the highest ranks in regulatory and enforcement organizations that are most significant to our clients.
Our experienced team includes former leaders at the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Food and Drug Administration, the Federal Trade Commission, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, the Internal Revenue Service, the Department of Commerce, the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority, the Bank of England, the U.K’s Financial Reporting Council and the World Trade Organization.
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Corporate, Finance and Investments: Our Corporate, Finance and Investments team brings a collaborative approach to help clients execute complex, high-value transactions. We have a fully integrated platform with more than 330 lawyers in 17 offices, offering clients the benefit of global specialists with local knowledge and industry expertise. We work side by side with our clients to execute transactions efficiently and effectively—we understand what matters to both our clients and opposite parties and we explain the actual, practical risks to our clients.
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Updated Sep 2024
WilmerHale is a leading, full-service international law firm with more than 1,100 lawyers located throughout 13 offices in the United States, Europe and Asia. Our lawyers work at the intersection of government, technology and business, and we remain committed to our guiding principles of:
Litigation & Trial:
Our lawyers have played an integral role in many of the most significant cases across the globe over the past several years, including internal and governmental investigations; patent, copyright and trademark cases; regulatory, government and public policy disputes; securities class action lawsuits; and federal and state appellate cases. Clients rely on our strong understanding of their industries and business goals, pragmatic and clear advice—even in the midst of complicated issues, complex legal and regulatory regimes, and high-stakes decisions—and ability to deliver practical solutions to realworld problems. Our cases and achievements cut across the litigation spectrum, and we have experience across industries, including aviation; bankruptcy and commercial; communications; defense and national security; government contracts; energy, environment and natural resources; financial institutions; labor and employment; technology; and trade.
WilmerHale’s elite lineup of intensely smart, battle-tested litigators can face down any adversary in the courtroom and win. We combine a mastery of proven trial techniques with the intellectual depth to tackle the most novel and complex legal challenges. A client may face an intractable issue that requires pushing the law into new territory. A verdict may turn on the ability to make the most arcane technology compelling to a judge or jury. An individual company officer may need a winning defense in a first-of-its-kind prosecution. In trial after landmark trial, our gift for strategy and our ability to draw cogent themes and narratives from even the most impenetrable facts and points of law have won us countless victories. And the way we win has brought us the respect of judges, juries, clients and competitors across the United States and internationally.
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Please visit our website at wilmerhale.com to learn more about the firm.
Updated Sep 2024