Richard Goetz is a partner at O’Melveny & Myers, where he chairs the firm’s Class Actions, Mass Torts and Insurance Litigation Practice. He defends some of the world’s best-known companies—pharmaceutical, medical device, computer, insurance, consumer products, food—in complex, multimillion-dollar legal challenges. He has also served on O’Melveny’s Policy Committee—the firm’s board of directors—and the Policy Committee’s four-member Executive Committee, and he chairs the committee that vets candidates for partnership.
In his 30 years at O’Melveny, Mr. Goetz led the defense in international disputes both in U.S. courts and in an arbitration in Japan; entertainment and intellectual property disputes for a motion picture studio, a film director, a television producer, a sports marketing company, and a defense contractor; environmental actions for an electric utility, a steel company, and an automobile manufacturer; construction disputes for a natural resources company; and securities actions for commercial and investment banks.
Mr. Goetz teaches class action issues at Rutter Group conferences annually in Los Angeles and San Francisco. He has also lectured at the UCLA Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science and at Harvard Law School.
He is a longtime member of the Pacific Council on International Policy, and co-chairs the Council’s Counterterrorism Subcommittee. In 2013, he traveled to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, as the Council’s first official observer of the proceedings against Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, and in 2012, he joined a Council delegation to North Korea, authoring the official account of the trip.
EDUCATION: Dartmouth College, A.B.; University of Chicago Law School, J.D.