Bart H. Williams

As a partner at Proskauer in Los Angeles, Bart H. Williams practices complex civil and commercial litigation regarding consumer products, entertainment and internal corporate investigations, but he is perhaps best known for delivering wins late in the game.

“I would say one of the things that our team prides ourselves on is the ability to come in on cases, even when it’s close to trial,” he said. “Our forte is being quick studies, coming in late, figuring out ways to describe fact patterns, even in complex areas like patents … in ways that juries can understand.”

A prime example of this occurred when he and partner, Susan Gutierrez, were asked to serve as lead trial counsel for Gilead Sciences in a four-year-old antitrust case on allegations that the pharmaceutical company struck an anti-competitive patent settlement related to two HIV medications, Truvada and Atripla, thereby delaying the entry of generic drugs to the market. After a six-week trial, a San Francisco jury delivered a full defense verdict, the first of its kind to find for the defense on such a matter.

“Gilead is an amazing company that does amazing things, and sells great drugs and has saved probably millions of people’s lives,” he said, noting that the patent system “causes our country to be at the cutting edge of innovation in science.”

Williams also secured a breakthrough victory for Monsanto in a case brought by a plaintiff who claimed that the use of the herbicide Roundup caused her to develop non-Hodgkin lymphoma. A California jury returned a defense verdict on all counts, which was the second defense verdict in the mass tort litigation and the first of its kind regarding “general causation.”

He attributes the victory to the testimony of his witness, Dr. Cristian Tomasetti, a renowned expert on cancer research, who demonstrated that approximately 94.5% of the mutations that cause non-Hodgkin lymphoma are natural replication errors as opposed to environmental or hereditary factors.

In an upcoming matter, Williams is lead trial counsel for Netflix in a defamation case brought by former New York criminal prosecutor Linda Fairstein, who claims she was unfairly represented in the television series, “When They See Us,” which dramatizes the account of the “Central Park Five,” who were wrongly accused of rape.

—Kathryn Stelmach Artuso