Kathleen M. Sullivan is a partner in Quinn Emanuel Urwuhart & Sullivan, LLP’s New York and Los Angeles offices and the chair of its national appellate practice. Widely recognized as one of the nation’s top appellate advocates, she has been named repeatedly to The National Law Journal’s list of The 100 Most Influential Lawyers in America. In other recognition, she has been repeatedly named a leading individual in Chambers USA, which reports that clients have described her as “tremendously agile and a fabulous advocate,” “a consummate practitioner before any appeal court” and “a brilliant appellate lawyer.” Lawdragon has included her numerous times in its list of 500 Leading Lawyers in America, as has Super Lawyers, which in 2015 named Sullivan one of the top 100 lawyers in the New York Metro area. Law360 has three times named Sullivan an Appellate MVP, The American Lawyer Litigation Daily has twice named her Litigator of the Week, and California Lawyer once named her Appellate Lawyer of the Year. Sullivan was profiled in the December 2013 issue of The American Lawyer in a cover story entitled “The Golden Touch” and in a 2014 Super Lawyers feature entitled, “Kathleen Sullivan and the Appeal of Appellate Law," reprinted as the cover story in Super Lawyer’s 2015 issue on the top women lawyers in the New York area. In 2014, Sullivan was elected to the American Academy of Appellate Lawyers and in 2015, the NewYork Law Journal conferred on her a Lifetime Achievement award in its feature “Lawyers Who Lead By Example.”
The former Dean of Stanford Law School, she joined the firm in 2005 after a long and storied career as professor of law at Harvard and Stanford Law Schools, where she taught constitutional law to several generations of law students. She represents a wide range of clients, including Samsung, Shell Oil, Entergy, Google, Cisco, Coca-Cola, AIG, and CNA. She has argued nine times before the United States Supreme Court; numerous cases in the US Courts of Appeals, including the First, Second, Third, Fifth, Seventh, Ninth and Federal Circuits; and various cases in state high courts including the New York Court of Appeals and the California Supreme Court. In addition to her appeals practice, she plays an active role in the firm’s trial practice, including by arguing numerous significant pre-trial, trial and post-trial motions in the federal district courts.