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The Young Litigators Fab Fifty
Daralyn Durie

Daralyn Durie, 39
Keker & Van Nest

Durie made a big splash in 2002 when she second-seated John Keker in the successful defense of biotech giant Genentech, Inc., against a $300 million claim that it had infringed Chiron Corporation’s patent on cancer antibodies. Durie then turned the Genentech win into a string of first-chair cases. She is now lead counsel for Comcast Cable Communications, Inc.; Google Inc.; and Netflix, Inc., in intellectual property litigation that ranges from patent infringement to unfair competition. Durie’s most recent win came in November 2006, when she staved off a $2.2 billion patent infringement claim against Comcast by Caritas Technologies Inc., that had threatened to shut down Comcast’s Internet phone service.
Alice Fisher

Alice Fisher, 39
U.S. Dept. of Justice, Criminal Division

Assistant attorney general Fisher has handled some of the government’s largest investigations in recent years. The Kentucky native and former Sullivan & Cromwell associate is a longtime protégé of U.S. Department of Homeland Security secretary Michael Chertoff, who first hired her to work on the Senate Whitewater investigation in 1995. Fisher spent five years at Latham & Watkins before Chertoff, who was by then the head of Justice’s criminal division, made her his deputy assistant attorney general. Since then she has managed major terrorism and fraud cases in the wake of 9/11, as well as identity theft and corporate fraud prosecutions including Enron Corp. and HealthSouth Corporation.
Jeffrey Fisher

Jeffrey Fisher, 36
Davis Wright Tremaine and Stanford University

As a fourth-year associate at Seattle’s Davis Wright in 2004, Fisher went from relative obscurity to two U.S. Supreme Court victories in one term. Both cases dramatically affected the criminal justice system. In Blakely v. Washington, the court ruled that the Sixth Amendment right to a jury trial also applies to sentencing guidelines; and in Crawford v. Washington, the justices forbade the use of a recorded statement from a witness who couldn’t be cross-examined. In 2006 Fisher—a University of Michigan School of Law graduate and a former clerk to Justice John Paul Stevens—argued four more cases in the Court in 2006 and joined the Stanford Law School faculty.
Katherine Forrest

Katherine Forrest, 42
Cravath, Swaine & Moore

As a first-year partner, Forrest found a new way to provide counsel to an old Cravath client. On behalf of Time Warner Inc.’s music division, Forrest was at the forefront of the pivotal fights that established the recording industry’s intellectual property rights in the age of Internet downloading. She co-led a winning class action in 2000 against MP3.com, Inc., for making unlicensed copies of CDs available to users over the Internet. A New York University School of Law graduate, Forrest also led a precedent-setting case for Time Warner that gave record companies, not artists, the digital rights to music produced before the advent of the Internet under the standard recording industry contract.
Gregory Garre

Gregory Garre, 42
Deputy U.S. Solicitor General

As John Roberts’s understudy and heir apparent at Hogan & Hartson in the 1990s, Garre argued five cases in state and federal appellate courts—and won all of them. In his first stint in the U.S. solicitor general’s office, from 2000 to 2004, he argued nine cases at the U.S. Supreme Court and led early-round arguments in the terrorism-related Hamdi and Rasul cases. Back at Hogan to head the appellate practice after Roberts’s elevation to chief justice, Garre made three more Supreme Court arguments, including a win over Harvard law professor Laurence Tribe in a First Amendment case. Garre returned to the SG’s office in 2005 as a principal deputy.
David Gross

David Gross, 43
Faegre & Benson

Gross began his career as a litigator with the U.S. Department of Justice, then worked at Covington & Burling and Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom before joining Faegre and finding a niche in patent litigation. In his highest-profile case, Gross represented Wyeth in a trade secret theft suit against Natural Biologic Inc, scoring a key win when Natural Biologics was permanently enjoined from developing a generic version of Wyeth’s billion-dollar Premarin hormone replacement drug. Harvard Law School–trained Gross also won a $300 million settlement for the University of Minnesota in its suit against GlaxoSmithKline over a licensing agreement for the AIDS drug Ziagen.
Mary Beth Hogan

Mary Beth Hogan, 43
Debevoise & Plimpton

Hogan’s docket spans multiple practice areas. She represented Owens Corning in its multibillion-dollar asbestos liability trial and supervised the defense of more than 30,000 asbestos personal injury suits against the company. She is defending Credit Suisse First Boston and six other lenders in a purported lender liability class action. And she has worked on several high-stakes internal investigations. Debevoise litigation cochair John Kiernan calls her the go-to partner on employment matters and other cases that require sensitivity. Hogan, a Rutgers School of Law graduate, is the youngest partner on the firm’s eight-person management committee and was the first litigator at the firm to become partner while working part-time.
John Hueston

John Hueston, 42
Irell & Manella

Hueston, a member of the Enron Task Force as a Los Angeles assistant U.S. attorney, led the prosecution of Kenneth Lay, conducting the cross-examination of the former chief executive officer as well as the examination of former Enron Corp. chief financial officer Andrew Fastow. Enron capped a 12-year Department of Justice career for Hueston, who previously prosecuted U.S. Army Colonel Richard Moran in a defense contractor fraud case, and Tony Minh Nguyen in a criminal trademark infringement case. Hueston, a Yale Law School graduate, won every case he tried as a prosecutor. A hot commodity on the hiring market last summer, Hueston has recently been making the beauty contest rounds for Irell.
Tarek Ismail

Tarek Ismail, 37
Bartlit Beck Herman Palenchar & Scott

A few years back, Ismail was a key supporting player in Bartlit Beck’s enormously successful defense of Bayer AG’s cholesterol-lowering drug Baycol. Since then he has emerged as one of the most experienced and successful courtroom lawyers on Merck & Co., Inc.’s Vioxx defense team. After backing up name partner Philip Beck in two successive Vioxx trials—one a win and one a hung jury—Ismail first-chaired and won the first case to be tried in California state court. Most recently, Beck and Ismail teamed up for their second win in federal court in November 2006. It was the third Vioxx win of the year for Ismail, who finished first in his class at the University of Illinois College of Law.
Neal Katyal

Neal Katyal, 36
Georgetown University Law Center

Last June, Georgetown constitutional law professor Katyal argued and won Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, the landmark U.S. Supreme Court case that struck down military tribunals at Guantánamo Bay. (Katyal represented Guantánamo inmate Salim Hamdan, Osama bin Laden’s driver.) A former clerk to Justice Stephen Breyer and a member of the Clinton administration Justice Department, Katyal was also cocounsel for Vice President Al Gore in Bush v. Palm Beach County Canvassing Board in 2000. Out of court, Katyal did a star turn on the Comedy Central’s Colbert Report for which, he jokes, “I prepared harder . . . than [for] my argument before the Supreme Court.”

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