After 27 years at Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan, including 23 years as a partner, Diane Cafferata is embarking on a new chapter: launching Cafferata Litigation Firm in Pasadena, California.
The move brings together two sides of Cafferata's professional identity. She's a seasoned trial lawyer whose career has encompassed complex commercial disputes for clients including Samsung, Pop Mart, and the Lehman Brothers Estate. She's also a Stanford JD/MBA whose entrepreneurial instincts have influenced her approach to practicing law throughout her career.
“I was drawn to the energy and creativity of building businesses,” Cafferata says. “Quinn Emanuel was itself an extraordinarily entrepreneurial firm, particularly in its early years. It was innovative, ambitious, and focused on solving businesses' biggest problems. So litigation wasn't really a departure from my business interests. It was a more indirect way of pursuing them.”
Her new firm focuses on business litigation and private wealth litigation, bringing decades of sophisticated trial experience to disputes involving businesses, entrepreneurs, trusts, estates and family wealth.
Cafferata is known for combining tenacious advocacy with a personal approach to client relationships. She's also the author of Business Litigation Demystified and its companion Discussion Guide, designed to make the American litigation system more accessible to a wide range of audiences. Shortly after the book's publication, she was recognized among the Los Angeles Business Journal's 2021 Women of Influence: Attorneys, an acknowledgment that complemented her efforts to make complex litigation more understandable to the business community.
Her professional recognition also includes repeated selections to the Lawdragon 500 Leading Plaintiff Financial Lawyers, Lawdragon 500 Global Plaintiff Lawyers, and Lawdragon 500 Global Leaders in Crisis Management.
Now she's taking the experience and perspective gained at one of the world's leading litigation firms and putting them to work in an enterprise of her own.
“It's an opportunity to combine everything I love about litigation with the freedom to build a firm that reflects my own vision,” she says.
Lawdragon: After so many years at Quinn Emanuel, what inspired you to launch your own firm?
Diane Cafferata: I've had a wonderful career at Quinn Emanuel. I joined when the firm was much smaller and had the opportunity to grow professionally alongside it. I worked with immensely talented lawyers, handled fascinating cases, and had tremendous freedom to develop my own practice.
Quinn was an unusually entrepreneurial place, especially in its earlier years. There was a willingness to challenge conventional thinking about how law firms should operate and how litigation should be approached. That environment suited me.
Eventually, I realized I had the experience, the relationships, and the opportunity to create a law firm that reflected my own ideas about how litigation should be practiced and how clients should be served.
LD: What will Cafferata Litigation Firm look like?
DC: We're focused on two areas: business litigation and private wealth litigation.
Business litigation has been the foundation of my career. I've handled complex commercial disputes involving intellectual property, including patents, trademarks, and trade secrets, unfair competition, financial transactions, contracts, business torts and cross-border issues.
Private wealth litigation is an area where that experience can be particularly valuable. Significant disputes involving trusts, estates, family businesses and substantial family wealth often raise sophisticated financial and commercial issues, questions of fiduciary responsibility, and allegations of misconduct.
These disputes call for many of the same skills I’ve developed over decades of complex business litigation: untangling complicated financial transactions, uncovering misconduct and developing effective litigation strategies.
We're not doing any estate planning or transactional work at the firm; our role is to help clients resolve disputes when important rights, assets, or relationships are at stake.
People want a bulldog, but they don't necessarily need it to come in a bulldog shape.
LD: You've talked before about the emotional dynamics of commercial litigation. Is that something you expect to carry into your new practice?
DC: Absolutely. People tend to think of business litigation as a rational disagreement about money or contractual rights. Sometimes it is. But often there's a much more personal story underneath.
I've handled disputes where former business partners feel betrayed, founders believe they've been cheated out of the businesses they created, or competitors are determined to destroy one another.
Sometimes litigation becomes a weapon rather than a means of resolving a dispute.
Understanding what's really motivating the people involved can be just as important as understanding the legal claims.
Clients need a lawyer who will fight for them, but they also need someone who can bring judgment and perspective to a situation that may have become emotionally overwhelming.
That's particularly relevant to private wealth litigation. When family relationships and substantial assets intersect, the emotional and financial stakes can be enormous.
LD: What has your experience at Quinn Emanuel taught you about approaching complex disputes?
DC: One of the things I've loved about my practice is its variety. I've worked with clients across industries and jurisdictions, often on matters involving complicated business, legal and strategic considerations.
That breadth of experience has taught me to approach litigation strategically and creatively, rather than mechanically.
I fell in love with civil procedure in law school because it's the engine behind everything. The substantive law matters enormously, of course, but the procedural framework can determine how a dispute unfolds and what opportunities are available to resolve it.
In international matters, that becomes even more interesting. Different jurisdictions have different legal systems, different approaches to discovery, and different regulatory considerations. Coordinating a coherent strategy across those systems requires understanding not just the law, but the client's broader objectives.
I enjoy figuring out how all the pieces fit together.
LD: What will be different for clients at your new firm?
DC: I want to deliver the sophistication and quality of litigation counsel that clients expect from a major firm, combined with a very personal level of service.
I want our clients to feel that they have a genuine partner who understands their objectives and is thinking creatively and proactively about how to achieve them.
Good litigation starts with the client's objectives and brings discipline, judgment and creativity to achieving them.
LD: Is that philosophy part of what inspired your book, "Business Litigation Demystified"?
DC: Very much so.
Litigation is a complicated process, and understanding how it works can make people more effective in whatever role they play in it.
I wanted to create a practical, accessible guide that would help readers understand the American litigation system without having to become litigators themselves.
It's useful for business executives and in-house counsel who want to deepen their understanding of litigation strategy and procedure. It's also a resource for foreign lawyers and companies dealing with litigation in the United States, law students, young associates, transactional lawyers, expert witnesses and litigation service providers.
My goal was to give readers a tool to deepen their understanding of litigation and see how the different pieces of the process fit together. The response has been enormously gratifying.
Writing the book was also an opportunity to combine my legal experience with my entrepreneurial instincts. It was a somewhat unconventional thing for a Big Law partner to do, and that was part of its appeal. I enjoyed finding a creative way to distinguish myself and build something different within my practice.
LD: You have a reputation as a very aggressive litigator, but you also emphasize client relationships and communication. How do those qualities fit together?
DC: I think the two go hand in hand. Clients want someone who will stand up for them and who isn't intimidated by a difficult opponent. But they also want someone they can talk to, someone who listens, and someone who understands that litigation is happening in the context of their lives or businesses.
People want a bulldog, but they don't necessarily need it to come in a bulldog shape.
People are sometimes surprised to learn I’m a litigator. If you're my client, I'm warm, protective and completely committed to helping you. If you're on the other side and behaving unreasonably, you're going to find me a very determined adversary.
I think there's tremendous value in being able to combine toughness with empathy and good judgment.
LD: How has your experience influenced the kind of firm culture you want to create?
DC: One of the things I'm most proud of from my years at Quinn Emanuel is helping talented younger lawyers develop confidence and take ownership of their work.
When you give smart, motivated people real responsibility, they often exceed your expectations. People do their best work when they feel comfortable asking questions, challenging assumptions, and proposing creative ideas.
At Cafferata Litigation Firm, I want to build a collaborative culture that values excellence, initiative, creativity, generosity and mutual respect.
And I want people to enjoy the work. We spend so much of our lives practicing law. It should be intellectually challenging and rewarding, but it should also be a place where people can thrive.
LD: What do you see as the greatest opportunity in launching your firm now?
DC: The opportunity to be intentional about everything.
After nearly three decades of practicing law, I have a pretty good sense of what works, what doesn't, and what I wish could be done differently.
Starting a firm gives me the chance to decide how we communicate with clients, how we use technology, how we staff matters, how we manage costs and how we deliver consistently excellent service.
One of the things that excites me is the opportunity to build the firm’s systems and processes from the ground up, rather than simply inheriting the way things have always been done.
Technology is a big part of that. There are tasks that historically consumed enormous amounts of lawyers’ time that can now be accomplished much more efficiently. That frees us to spend more time on the work that really requires our judgment and creativity: developing strategy, identifying the strongest arguments, presenting compelling evidence and advocating effectively for our clients.
I want to build a firm that uses modern tools intelligently, so that we can focus more of our time and energy on achieving the best possible results for our clients.
LD: Looking back, how do you think your years at Quinn Emanuel prepared you for this next chapter?
DC: Quinn Emanuel gave me an extraordinary foundation.
I had the opportunity to work on difficult, important cases with some of the most talented litigators in the world. I learned to take on formidable opponents, to think creatively, and to approach litigation with confidence.
The firm also gave me substantial freedom to build my practice and pursue my interests. I'm deeply grateful for that.
And I leave with tremendous respect for my colleagues and for what the firm has accomplished.
Now I'm taking those experiences and applying them to something of my own.
LD: What do you do for fun outside of work?
DC: One of my passions is motorsports. I've spent many years exploring different forms of performance driving, including racing, and I teach performance driving.
One thing I love about racing is the concentration it requires. When you're on the track, you have to be completely focused on what you're doing. You can't be thinking about your cases, your clients, or anything but driving. It centers me.
LD: What's next for Diane Cafferata?
DC: Building Cafferata Litigation Firm into exactly the kind of practice I've envisioned.
I want to do interesting, challenging work for clients who value sophisticated legal judgment. I want to build relationships that last. And I want to create a place where excellent lawyers can do their best work.
After 27 years, I still love being a litigator. Now I get to combine that with the experience of being an entrepreneur.
