Laura W. Brill is a partner at Irell & Manella LLP. Her practice focuses on complex litigation including appellate, first amendment, and intellectual property matters.

Ms. Brill attended Brown University, earning an A.B. degree in American civilization in 1987. She attended Columbia University School of Law, where she served as book reviews editor of the Columbia Law Review and was named a James Kent Scholar and a Harlan Fiske Stone Scholar. She earned her J.D. degree in 1994 and was awarded the John Ordroneaux Prize for General Proficiency in Legal Study and the Emil Schlesinger Labor Law Prize. Ms. Brill tied for first place in her class and went on to serve as law clerk to the Honorable Wilfred Feinberg of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit and as law clerk to the Honorable Ruth Bader Ginsburg of the United States Supreme Court. Ms. Brill became a partner of the firm in 2001.  She has served as vice chair and chair of the firm's hiring committee.

In 2000, Ms. Brill received the People for the American Way Foundation’s Defenders of Democracy Award in honor of her leadership and achievement in protecting free speech and equal rights.

The Los Angeles Daily Journal and the San Francisco Daily Journal have named Ms. Brill as one of the 75 top women litigators in California.  Ms. Brill has been selected for inclusion in The Best Lawyers in America for 2007, 2008 and again for 2009 in appellate as well as intellectual property law.  Also, Los Angeles Magazine selected Ms. Brill for inclusion in Southern California "Super Lawyers" in 2006 through 2008 and named her one of the "Top 50 Women Lawyers” in Southern California in 2008.

Representative Matters

Intellectual Property and Entertainment Litigation

• Ms. Brill has been involved in numerous complex patent litigation matters, including defending Hewlett-Packard Company in cases relating to ink jet and battery management technology, and representing Compaq Computer Corporation in a case relating to battery management and disk drive technology.
• Ms. Brill also has substantial appellate experience in intellectual property matters, including representing Respondent City of Hope before the United States Supreme Court in MedImmune v. Genentech and City of Hope and representing TiVo Inc. before the Federal Circuit in TiVo Inc. v. EchoStar Communications Corp.
•  Ms. Brill has also represented amici curiae in several noteworthy intellectual property cases, including filing an amicus brief to the United States Supreme Court on behalf of the American Association of Universities and the National Association of State Universities and Land-Grant Colleges in the case of eBay v. MercExchange; filing an amicus brief to the Federal Circuit in the patent case Festo Corp. v. Shoketsu Kinzoku Kogyo Kabushiki Co., Ltd., and an amicus brief to the Ninth Circuit on behalf of Alta Vista, Google, and Yahoo! in Kelly v. Arriba Soft Corp., 336 F.3d 811 (9th Cir. 2003), a case relating to the right of search engines to use graphic images.

First Amendment and Freedom of Expression

• Ms. Brill represents outdoor advertising companies in litigation involving constitutional challenges to burdensome regulations affecting outdoor advertising.
• In a pro bono matter, Ms. Brill has represented plaintiffs in a landmark case concerning the rights of students at a public high school in Orange County, California, to receive equal treatment for a gay-straight alliance. The United States District Court for the Central District of California imposed a preliminary injunction requiring that the school permit the students to meet.  See Colin v. Orange Unified School District, 83 F. Supp. 2d 1135 (C.D. Cal. 2000).
• Ms. Brill has also represented companies sued for libel and slander of title and has counseled clients on First Amendment issues arising in the context of bankruptcy proceedings. Ms. Brill has also represented clients in disputes involving issues of press access to sealed court records.

Other Constitutional and Appellate Litigation

• Ms. Brill served as lead counsel in the case Pasquantino v. United States, which she argued before the U.S. Supreme Court in November 2004. The case raised the question whether the U.S. government could bring a wire fraud prosecution based upon a scheme to evade foreign taxes. In proceedings following the Supreme Court’s ruling, Ms. Brill’s client’s 21-month sentence was vacated.
• Ms. Brill has defended the California State Senate in an action under the Voting Rights Act and the U.S. Constitution that challenged the district lines for United State Congress and the California State Senate that were enacted in the wake of the 2000 Census. A three-judge district court, composed of Reinhardt, C.J., and Morrow and Snyder, D.J.J., granted summary judgment in favor of the State Senate, and the United States Supreme Court affirmed.  See Cano v. Davis, 211 F. Supp. 2d 1208 (C.D. Cal. 2002), affirmed, 113 S. Ct. 851 (2003).
• Ms. Brill has represented leading securities industry trade groups in the filing of an amicus brief in the Fifth Circuit in a case concerning third party liability for securities violations in civil litigation arising out of the Enron scandal.
• Ms. Brill has represented the NOW Legal Defense & Education Fund as amicus curiae in support of the petitioner in the case Lawrence v. Texas, 123 S. Ct. 2472 (2003), which challenged Texas’s criminal law punishing same-sex sexual conduct.  The U.S. Supreme Court struck down the Texas statute in June 2003.

Professional Activities

Ms. Brill is a member of the Columbia Law School Board of Visitors and is a co-chair of the Pro Bono and Public Interest Practice Litigation Committee of the American Bar Association Section of Litigation.  She also serves on the Board of Directors of the Los Angeles Chapter of the Federal Bar Association and has served on the California State Bar Committee on Appellate Courts. 

Publications

• Note, The First Amendment and the Power of Suggestion: Protecting “Negligent” Speakers in Cases of Imitative Harm, 94 Colum. L. Rev. 984 (1994).
• Ruth Bader Ginsburg & Laura W. Brill, Address, Women in the Federal Judiciary: Three Way Pavers and the Exhilarating Change President Carter Wrought, 64 Fordham L. Rev. 281 (1995).
• Ruth Bader Ginsburg & Laura W. Brill, Remembering Great Ladies: Supreme Court Wives’ Stories, 24 J. Sup. Ct. Hist. 255 (1999).
• Ms. Brill has published numerous articles in the Los Angeles Daily Journal and Chicago Daily Law Bulletin regarding circuit splits of interest to the business community.

Bar & Court Admissions

• 1995, New York; 1998, California
• U.S. Supreme Court, U.S. Court of Appeals, Third, Fifth, Ninth, and Federal Circuits; U.S. District Court, Central, Northern and Southern Districts of California and U.S. District Court, Southern and Eastern Districts of New York