William F. Stute

When Will F. Stute was a young lawyer, he would seek out the best criminal lawyers, go to court and watch them work. “I’ve always been a student of the art,” he said.

He still is. Often, when he is relaxing at home and his family is watching TV, Stute flips open his laptop, goes to a courtroom trial website and watches a good lawyer try a case.

“I probably do that once or twice a week,” Stute said.

He is himself an excellent courtroom lawyer whom others might want to watch. He has represented leading companies in tech, life sciences, insurance, logistics and more.

These days, clients seek him out to try their most important matters. The clients see him as “somebody who’s a trial lawyer who’s very effective in front of juries and able to craft narratives here and bring those narratives into the courtroom to successfully defend them,” he said.

Stute is best known for winning defense verdicts for the National Collegiate Athletic Association in the first two trials over CTE claims brought by former college football players’ families.

In November 2022, he and his team defeated a $55 million wrongful death lawsuit by the widow of a former USC star who had played in the 1990 Rose Bowl. She claimed thousands of blows and concussions her husband suffered back then led to chronic traumatic encephalopathy and to his later health problems and death. The defense countered that he died from a long history of drug and alcohol abuse, morbid obesity and other health problems. Gee v. NCAA, 20STCV43627 (L.A. Super. Ct., filed Nov. 12, 2020).

“That was really a critically important bellwether case, not only for the NCAA, but for college football generally,” Stute said.

He won the second NCAA CTE wrongful death defense verdict just three months later in Indiana. Finnerty v. NCAA, 49D14-1808-CT-033896 (Marion, Ind., Super. Ct., filed Aug. 27, 2018).

Stute continues to represent the college sports association in these cases. But he tries many other types of litigation as well.

Recently, he began representing video game maker Roblox Corp. in new litigation claiming that video games “are dangerous, addictive, and causing brain damage,” Stute said.

In October, he was part of the trial team that won a defense verdict in a patent case for Zynga, which makes cellphone games. “They asked me to jump in and help them craft the narrative and to try the case,” he said.

Earlier this month, he was scheduled to help defend Johnson & Johnson in a talc-asbestos-mesothelioma trial in New Orleans. Before he went, Stute watched another J&J defense attorney’s winning closing argument on his laptop.

— Don DeBenedictis