Chuck Diamond is a partner in O’Melveny’s Century City office and a member of the Business Trial and Litigation Practice. Chuck is the senior partner of the litigation group, which he started twenty-five years ago. As a member of the Antitrust and Intellectual Property and Technology Groups, Diamond’s practice encompasses a wide variety of antitrust, commercial, and intellectual property disputes, with a pronounced emphasis on “big case” jury trial work. Dubbed recently a “star litigator” by the San Francisco Chronicle and named as one of California’s top antitrust litigators by Chambers USA, Diamond is a Fellow in the prestigious American College of Trial Lawyers.
Among other celebrated jury victories in Diamond’s resume are back-to-back defense verdicts won for ExxonMobil in Alaska in two multimillion-dollar cases arising from the grounding of the Exxon Valdez. The National Law Journal ranked the most recent of these verdicts among the “Top Defense Wins” of the year. Before that, Diamond and another team won a US$192 million jury verdict in a patent fraud antitrust case brought against Silicon Valley’s Raychem Corp.
In long-running litigation for Paramount Pictures, Diamond rebuffed Art Buchwald’s nationally-televised attempt to win millions on account of Paramount’s accounting practices on the film Coming to America, and he successfully defended Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher in a legal malpractice suit brought on behalf of a prominent Los Angeles businessman.
More recently, Diamond led a team opposing efforts by former California Gov. Davis and others to block the California Gubernatorial Recall Election, culminating in a nationally televised election-eve argument before an en banc Ninth Circuit, which ordered the election held on schedule. As a result of that engagement, Diamond became an advisor to then-Governor-elect Schwarzenegger, who appointed Diamond to his transition committee.
The Los Angeles Business Journal has recognized Diamond’s stature in the Los Angeles legal community, putting him on its "Top 100" lawyer list two years running, and his wins have been chronicled on the pages of The American Lawyer and the National Law Journal. For four years running, he was recognized as a Southern California "Super Lawyer" in surveys conducted by Law & Politics Media Inc. and published in Los Angeles magazine.
Diamond’s jury trial skills were honed in the 1980s as a court-appointed criminal defense lawyer in the Central District of California, when he defended 50 major felonies and handled over a half-dozen criminal appeals (including a U.S. Supreme Court argument), winning both dismissals and acquittals. He subsequently defended corporations and individuals facing prosecution by U.S. Justice Department and a host of other federal agencies, including the Office of Foreign Assets Control, the Customs Service, the Postal Service, and the Fish and Wildlife Service.
For the past twenty years, Diamond has focused on antitrust, entertainment industry and intellectual property disputes, particularly those headed for trial. I n 2001, Gemstar retained him shortly before trial to prove up its patent infringement claims in the In re Set-Top Box Litigation, the largest patent dispute ever to come before the International Trade Commission, and it later hired him again to take the lead in a related billion-dollar antitrust case. Before that, Sony Pictures and its parent hired him to defend an idea theft claim brought by an inventor claiming ownership of a home-theater surround-sound invention. The list of other entertainment, media and technology clients for whom he has successfully litigated IP disputes is long and diverse and includes major studios, national newspapers, national television networks, record labels and a national toy brand.
