LOS ANGELES, January 24, 2024 – Proskauer, a leading international law firm, is pleased to announce that partner Bart Williams has been named as one of the Daily Journal’s 2024 Leading Commercial Litigators. The annual list recognizes the top 100 lawyers who led major litigation in California and nationally.
Bart is a highly sought-after trial lawyer renowned for his legal acumen, meticulous approach and persuasive advocacy. He has extensive experience in commercial litigation, white collar criminal defense and corporate investigations, and excels in guiding Fortune 500 companies through complex litigation crises and trying their most important cases before juries and judges. Known for his ability to deliver the win, Bart is often called upon just months or weeks before a trial. His cutting-edge legal work regularly impacts and set precedents across industries.
In recent years, Bart has served as a go-to trial lawyer in headline-making, bet-the-company litigation matters. Notably, Bart and his team were retained by Gilead Sciences, Inc. to be lead trial counsel just three months before the start of the $3.6 billion HIV antitrust case and delivered a total defense verdict following a six-week trial. The verdict was the third ever in reverse-payment cases of this type, and the first ever to find for the defense on grounds of the absence of a payment and the absence of market power for the brand in the relevant market.
Bart previously scored a landmark victory for Monsanto in a case brought by a woman claiming that the use of the herbicide Roundup caused her non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. The verdict in Stephens v. Monsanto was the second defense verdict in the Roundup mass tort litigation and the first involving a plaintiff who used the product herself. He also served as lead counsel to Miramax in a ground-breaking lawsuit against director Quentin Tarantino involving allegations of intellectual property infringement and breach of contract related to the offering of non-fungible tokens for the film Pulp Fiction. Bart's leadership led to a pioneering copyright settlement, marking the first of its kind involving NFTs.
Read Bart’s full profile in the Daily Journal (subscription required): https://www.dailyjournal.com/articles/376696-bart-h-williams
About Proskauer
We are 800+ lawyers serving clients from 12 offices located in the leading financial and business centers in the Americas, Europe and Asia. We work with asset managers, private equity and venture capital firms, Fortune 500 and FTSE companies, major sports leagues, entertainment industry legends and industry-redefining companies.
Proskauer has a full-service litigation practice with extensive trial experience in virtually every major forum across the globe. We take a collaborative approach to representing defendants and plaintiffs, multinationals, middle-market and small-cap businesses, financial institutions, partnerships and individuals, with one thing in mind – driving successful outcomes for our clients.
Recent successful representations include a landmark victory for Sanderson Farms in a $7 billion broiler chicken antitrust conspiracy case; a decisive victory for Gilead Sciences, Inc. in a $3.6 billion antitrust case; a victory for Shamrock Capital Advisors in a high-profile $1 billion lawsuit brought by the founders and other minority shareholders of FanDuel; and representing Monsanto in a case brought by multiple plaintiffs who claimed Roundup caused their non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma.
