Jon Dean

Lecturer in Law
Last Updated: July 18, 2024

Jon Dean is a co-instructor for LAW 874, which will be taught during the Spring 2023 semester. Dean is a capital partner at McDermott Will & Emery LLP where he serves as the Practice Group Leader for the litigation group in Los Angeles as well as the Los Angeles Pro Bono Committee chair. Dean is a former prosecutor and has served as trial and appellate counsel on both civil and criminal cases. Dean focuses his practice on complex commercial litigation matters, including patent and trade secrets cases, antitrust actions, class actions, securities matters, unfair competition cases, employment actions, OSHA cases and healthcare matters. Dean has achieved several noteworthy results throughout his career. For instance, at the trial level, Dean served as counsel for the leading maker of office headsets in a $600 million+ antitrust action between direct competitors; the jury deliberated for barely an hour before returning a complete defense verdict in favor of his client. At the appellate level, Dean supervised a team of McDermott attorneys on a case before the U.S. Supreme Court. After the team’s petition for a writ of certiorari was granted, the McDermott team won vacatur and remand. Dean has also argued before the Third Circuit Court of Appeals and supervised cases before the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals.

Dean has been recognized as one of the top litigators in the country. He has been named to the Legal 500 US from 2020 to 2022, The Best Lawyers in America, Healthcare Law from 2021 to 2023, Benchmark Litigation from 2009 to 2020, and Chambers USA, Litigation: White-Collar Crime & Government Investigations in 2021.

Dean also previously served as a law clerk for the Hon. A. Andrew Hauk, former chief judge of the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California and worked for the Hon. Judge Saundra Brown Armstrong of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California. While in law school, Dean won U.C. Berkeley’s James Patterson McBaine Moot Court Competition (former Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia presiding). In college, Dean was a member of the UCLA debate team that won two cross-examination debate association national championships.

Dean received his BA from the University of California, Los Angeles, and his JD from the University of California, Berkeley School of Law.