Jonathan P. Schneller

Schneller is a litigation partner at O’Melveny who focuses on consumer class actions, product liability cases and other mass torts. He honed his skills at Harvard Law School as articles editor of the Harvard Law Review, as an appeals attorney for the federal public defender in Los Angeles and as law clerk to Judge Stephen R. Reinhardt of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals and Justice Elena Kagan of the U.S. Supreme Court.

“In appellate clerkships after law school there’s the expectation that you’ll write a lot of briefs, and I liked the work and thought I’d build a career on it, along with exploring litigation strategies and analysis,” he said.

Schneller said that working for Reinhardt and Kagan was formative. “Judge Reinhardt was a brilliant lawyer and a character for sure. He never used computers, which he distrustfully called machines. He’d sit with a draft opinion and a red pen, with unbroken concentration, for hours, and you’d get your brief back soaked in red ink. His version was invariably better.

“From Justice Kagan I learned analytical rigor and high standards. You’d stand behind her as she wrote and asked what you thought—a brilliant experience to see that kind of mind at work.”

Currently, Schneller has played a key appellate role in the opioid litigation in state court in California as he pushed back against plaintiff local governments’ efforts to judge shop by using multiple peremptory strikes. Prescription Opioid Cases, B302241 (2d DCA, op. filed Nov. 25, 2020).

For client Johnson & Johnson and its Janssen Pharmaceuticals Inc. subsidiary, he contested the plaintiffs’ effort to expand the right to challenge successive judges assigned in coordinated proceedings like those involving the opioid cases. His briefing helped persuade the appellate panel that Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge William F. Highberger was correct to keep himself on the case and reject the plaintiffs’ CCP 170.6 peremptory challenge—because they had already removed from the case the coordination motion judge.

The panel affirmed that 170.6 means what it says when it allows one challenge per side, including in JCCP proceedings where multiple judges may have a role, to avoid it being “converted into a weapon of offense” as the state Supreme Court put it in a 1977 case.

“This was important in the context of this litigation and more broadly,” Schneller said. “We represent a lot of clients in complex litigation, and we litigated this against a backdrop of ambiguous precedents. We were glad to prevail.”

Separately, Schneller is lead counsel in a pending pro bono cert petition asking the U.S. Supreme Court to review a capital conviction. Savage v. United States, 20-1389 (S.Ct., filed March 29, 2021).

“I spent three years as a federal defender, and it was important for my professional development. I enjoy being able to continue that work,” Schneller said.

— John Roemer