Diana Palacios 

Diana Palacios is a partner at Davis Wright Tremaine LLP, who focuses on the entertainment and media industry. Along with a full client roster, she teaches a course on the First Amendment at UC Irvine School of Law, her alma mater.

The teaching and the lawyering fulfilled her chief ambitions growing up. “I wanted to be a professor or an attorney, and I have found that being an attorney covers both because you’re always explaining to the clients or explaining to the courts,” she said. “And as an attorney, you get to see the effect of your work right away.”

Palacios started at Davis Wright Tremaine as a summer associate in 2011, then left to clerk for U.S. District Judge John A. Mendez of Sacramento and U.S. District Judge Dolly M. Gee of Los Angeles. She also managed to work as a research assistant for Erwin Chemerinsky when he was dean at Irvine.

“Dean Chemerinsky has almost a photographic memory and he can process information really quickly,” Palacios said. “Judge Gee sees things from many different perspectives. And Judge Mendez has an incredible fund of knowledge, partly because he came from the state court system. All were immensely helpful to my career.”

Among Palacios’ counseling projects is her work for the producers of a documentary distributed by Netflix about the high-profile Murdaugh murders, featuring the prominent South Carolina attorney Alex Murdaugh. His trial for killing his wife Maggie and their 22-year-old son Paul ended in convictions and two life sentences in March. The resulting true crime television series began to air while the trial was in progress.

“This project was incredibly fascinating because we produced it while the trial was happening,” Palacios said. “It raised defamation issues, privacy concerns and the problems of production during an ongoing investigation.”

The latest development, in the news in September, involved claims that the court clerk at the trial tampered with the jury, strengthening the defense’s appellate prospects. “It’s a saga with new allegations,” Palacios said. “There are a lot of pieces to this, and the producers are planning new episodes. I’ve never worked on a project with such up-to-the-moment happenings.”

Last year, Palacios and colleagues won appellate affirmance of their trial court win for Yelp Inc. in a case with unfair competition claims and a trade secrets angle. A restaurant owner sued over the removal of several positive reviews and sought to obtain the source code for Yelp’s customer review filter. A trial judge agreed to exclude the owner from the courtroom while the trade secrets related to the code were discussed and entered judgment for Yelp. The appellate panel agreed. Multiversal Enterprises-Mammoth Properties LLC v. Yelp Inc., B305193 (2d DCA, op. filed Feb. 4, 2022).

“We understood the significance of asking for the exclusion order. We didn’t do it lightly,” Palacios said.

—John Roemer