Law, disrupted

In this podcast, recorded before a live audience in China, John is joined by Professor Gao Xiqing, the former Vice Chairman, President, and Chief Investment Officer of the China Investment Corporation, China’s largest sovereign wealth fund. They discuss Professor Gao’s extraordinary career, from his early days building a railroad in rural China during the Cultural Revolution to earning his JD at D...

John is joined by Michael Gottlieb, partner in the Washington, D.C., office of Willkie Farr & Gallagher, and Nicholas Reddick, partner in the San Francisco office of Willkie Farr & Gallagher. They discuss the landmark $1.1 billion judgment Michael and Nicholas obtained against the Islamic Republic of Iran on behalf of U.S. service members and civilians harmed by Iran-backed terrorist group...

John is joined by Avi Perry, partner in Quinn Emanuel’s Washington, D.C., office, and Brett Raffish, an associate in the same office. They discuss how the Quinn Emanuel team, led by Bill Burck and Avi Perry, achieved a rare federal white collar criminal defense victory on behalf of technology executive Charlie Kim. The prosecution alleged that Mr. Kim and his co-CEO bribed four-star Admiral Robert...

John is joined by Shawn Fagan, the Chief Legal Officer of Citadel LLC and a key legal figure at Citadel Securities. Citadel is the most profitable hedge fund globally, while Citadel Securities is a leading market maker, processing nearly one-third of U.S. equities and options trades. They discuss Shawn’s insights into the unique legal challenges of these rapidly growing organizations. Shawn has es...

John is joined by Jeffrey N. Boozell and Christopher Tayback, both partners in Quinn Emanuel’s Los Angeles office. They discuss wildfire litigation as a specialized and rapidly growing area of law, driven by increasingly destructive fires in California and other western states. What began as a relatively limited practice in the 1990s evolved into a major practice area after large California wildfi...

John is joined by Miguel Rato and Marixenia Davilla, both partners in Quinn Emanuel’s Brussels office. They discuss a major antitrust and competition law class action brought in the United Kingdom against Qualcomm, a leading developer of mobile communications technology. The case was filed as an opt-out class action on behalf of consumers and alleged that Qualcomm had abused a dominant market posi...

John is joined by Jeffrey L. Kessler, Co-Executive Chairman of Winston & Strawn LLP. They discuss the remarkable antitrust trial Jeff won involving Live Nation and Ticketmaster. In that case, the Department of Justice, 33 states, and the District of Columbia sued Live Nation and Ticketmaster, only for the DOJ to settle and withdraw from the case one week into the trial. The remaining states co...

John is joined by renowned criminal defense attorney Ben Brafman, Founder of Brafman & Associates. They discuss Ben’s 45-year career, trial strategies, and reflections on the criminal justice system. Ben, who has tried more than 75 cases, gained prominence in the 1980s and 90s defending major criminal trials, particularly organized crime and white-collar cases. He was in trial almost continuou...

John is joined by Richard East, Senior Partner of Quinn Emanuel’s London office, and Nikolas Bruce-Smith, Partner in Quinn Emanuel’s London office. They discuss a major London commercial trial arising from the collapse of Greensill Capital and the resulting litigation between Credit Suisse and SoftBank. The plaintiff alleged that SoftBank sought to orchestrate, for its own ends, a complex restruct...

John Quinn is joined by Jack Neumark, Managing Partner and Co-Head of Specialty Finance of Fortress Investment Group and Founder of its Legal Assets Group. They discuss the emergence of legal assets as a distinct investment class.  Fortress is a leading player in litigation finance with over $6.5 billion deployed in legal assets and a current portfolio of approximately $3 billion. While most litig...

John is joined by John Bash, partner in Quinn Emanuel’s Austin office. They discuss a proposed California ballot initiative that would impose a one-time 5% wealth tax on individuals with net worth, including certain trusts, exceeding one billion dollars, if they are California residents as of January 1, 2026, with the tax calculated based on wealth as of December 31, 2026. The measure would amend...

John is joined by Shon Morgan and Jack Baumann, both partners in Quinn Emanuel’s Los Angeles office. They discuss the growing legal tension surrounding the aggregation and commercialization of publicly available information. It focuses on when compiling public data into structured, searchable databases creates a protectable property interest, and when such activity exposes companies to legal risk....

John is joined by Mark Wu, Henry L. Stimson Professor at Harvard Law School. They discuss the rapidly evolving legal and policy landscape surrounding U.S. tariffs following the Supreme Court’s decision invalidating the President’s reliance on emergency economic powers to impose broad tariffs. That ruling removed a significant set of tariffs but did not eliminate the overall tariff regime. Instead,...

John is joined by Christopher D. Kercher, partner in Quinn Emanuel's New York office. They discuss a proprietary litigation intelligence system developed inside Quinn Emanuel — built from a practicing litigator's perspective and designed to give case teams a decisive advantage from day one. The system, known internally as a "kerchbench," works by taking a case team's docum...

John is joined by Matthew Borden, partner and co-founder of BraunHagey & Borden, and Kory DeClark, partner at BraunHagey & Borden. They discuss litigation challenging federal law enforcement responses to protests, focusing on the Dickinson case in Portland, Oregon, that resulted in an injunction restricting how government agents may use force against demonstrators. The case arose from a se...

John is joined by Todd Anten, partner in Quinn Emanuel’s New York office and co-chair of the firm’s Trademark, Copyright, and Trade Secret practices, and Owen F. Roberts, partner in Quinn Emanuel’s New York office. They discuss a sixteen-year copyright dispute involving two appeals to the Second Circuit that centered on the scope of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act’s safe harbor provision. The...

John is joined by Robert M. (“Bobby”) Schwartz, partner in Quinn Emanuel’s Los Angeles office and co-chair of the firm’s Media & Entertainment Industry Practice, and Marie M. Hayrapetian, associate in Quinn Emanuel’s Los Angeles office. They discuss recent cases testing whether large language model AI outputs may give rise to defamation claims. In one recent Georgia case, a journalist asked Ch...

John is joined by Rebecca Abel, Supervising Deputy Federal Public Defender, and Kyra Nickell, Deputy Federal Public Defender, both with the Los Angeles Federal Public Defender's Office. They discuss the wave of criminal cases arising from protests in Los Angeles against immigration enforcement actions. Rebecca and Kyra offer their own insights and do not speak on behalf of the Los Angeles Fed...

John is joined by Jonathan Graham, Executive Vice President and General Counsel and Secretary of Amgen, one of the world’s largest biotech companies and one of the pioneers of the industry. They discuss in-house legal leadership in major biotech companies and how science, intellectual property, and regulation shape strategy. Jonathan began his practice clerking for the Ninth Circuit Court of Appea...

John is joined by Dennis H. Hranitzky, partner in Quinn Emanuel’s Salt Lake City office, and Fritz Scanlon, of counsel in Quinn Emanuel’s Washington, D.C. office. They discuss the recent Supreme Court decision invalidating all tariffs President Trump imposed under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA). IEEPA tariffs had generated an estimated $160 billion in revenue and were cent...

John is joined by Christopher P. Bogart, CEO and Co-Founder of Burford Capital. They discuss the evolving landscape of capital investment in law firms, focusing on the emergence of non-lawyer equity participation and managed service organization structures as potential solutions to long-standing financing constraints within the legal industry. Traditionally, U.S. law firms have been prohibited fro...

John is joined by Christopher L. Eisgruber, President of Princeton University and author of Terms of Respect: How Colleges Get Free Speech Right. They discuss the state of free speech on university campuses. While public perception often emphasizes crisis and failure, many institutions are upholding speech rights more effectively than they are credited for. The broad constitutional principles of f...

John is joined by Christopher G. Michel, partner in Quinn Emanuel’s Washington, D.C. office and Co-Chair of the firm’s National Appellate Practice. They discuss Michel’s team’s recent victory before the Delaware Supreme Court, reinstating Elon Musk’s Tesla compensation package, now valued at $139 billion, the largest compensation dispute in corporate history. The 2018 pay package required Musk to...

John is joined by Christopher D. Kercher and Peter H. Fountain, both partners in Quinn Emanuel’s New York office. They discuss their recent representation of Citadel Securities, one of the world’s largest market makers, in connection with a case concerning Mallinckrodt, a pharmaceutical company forced into bankruptcy due to opioid litigation. The central issue was whether $1.6 billion in stock sha...

John is joined by one of the most famous litigators in the world, David Boies, Chairman and Founding Partner of Boies Schiller Flexner.  They discuss David’s career, unique aspects of trial work, and the challenges of transitioning leadership in law firms.  David describes his early years at Cravath, Swaine & Moore, LLP, where he became a partner in 1972, and his founding of Boies Schiller in...