Daniel S. Floyd is a partner in Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher's Los Angeles office. He has served as the co-chair of the Litigation Department in the Los Angeles office for more than ten years, and has a broad experience, including lead jury trial experience, in a variety of complex commercial litigation matters.
Mr. Floyd has significant experience in antitrust litigation, corporate securities and mergers and acquisition litigation, trade secret litigation, consumer class action litigation, and the defense of professionals in negligence actions. Mr. Floyd's antitrust litigation experience includes a variety of actions brought under Section 1 and Section 2 of the Sherman Act, the Robinson-Patman Act and state law counterparts in federal and various state courts, as well as before the FTC, for various clients including Intel, Medtronic, Whirlpool, and American Airlines. Most recently, Mr. Floyd has been a key member of the team defending Intel Corporation in monopolization actions brought by its largest competitor, the Federal Trade Commission, and the New York Attorney General, as well as foreign competition authorities.
Mr. Floyd's securities and merger litigation experience has included representing corporate and individual officer and director defendants in more than twenty major class actions and shareholder derivative actions in federal and state courts and in administrative proceedings before the SEC, and representing both acquiring and target companies and directors in defending mergers and in pursuing and defending hostile transactions. He has obtained final dismissals of several securities and derivative actions. Mr. Floyd has defended a number of companies in class actions and representative actions brought under California's unfair business practices statute, including claims in the health care industry, the automobile industry and the retail industry. Mr. Floyd has also defended lawyers and investment bankers in malpractice actions, including obtaining summary judgment in 2002 in a high-profile legal malpractice claim against a major Los Angeles-based law firm. His litigation experience has also included constitutional litigation and a broad range of trade secret, breach of contract, bankruptcy and business tort litigation in state and federal trial and appellate courts.
Mr. Floyd's jury trial experience includes the successful defense of an attorney and law firm accused of malpractice in connection with union negotiations, a trade secret action in federal court, the defense of an investment bank in a jury trial arising out of a failed high-tech merger, the defense of a corporation and its officers and directors in a state securities class action, and the defense of a medical device corporation in a case under the Sherman Act and the Robinson Patman Act. Mr. Floyd has also argued many appeals in the Ninth and Fifth Circuits, as well as the California Courts of Appeal.
Mr. Floyd's published decisions include In re Intel Corp. Microprocessor Antitrust Litigation, 452 F. Supp. 2d 555 (D. Del. 2006) (dismissal under the Foreign Trade Antitrust Improvements Act), Medtronic MiniMed Inc. v. Smiths Medical MD Inc., 371 F. Supp. 2d 578 (D. Del. 2005) (summary judgment on a monopolization and tying claim), In re Syncor International Securities Litigation, 327 F. Supp. 2d 1149 (C.D. Cal. 2004) (dismissal with prejudice of federal securities case), Infusion Resources, Inc. v. MiniMed Inc., 351 F.3d 688 (5th Cir. 2003) (affirmance of summary judgment in a Robinson-Patman Act and Unfair Competition case), Lockheed Martin v. Superior, 29 Cal. 4th 1096 (2003) (a leading case overturning the certification of a medical monitoring class in a case of groundwater contamination), Yourish v. California Amplifier, 191 F.3d 983 (9th Cir. 1999) (affirming a dismissal with prejudice of a claim brought under the Federal Securities laws), Corzo v. Banco Central Reserva Del Peru, 243 F.3d 519 (9th Cir. 2001) (affirming dismissal of an action pursuant to the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act) and Chavez v. Whirlpool, 93 Cal. App. 4th 363 (2001) (affirming a dismissal of an action under the Cartwright Act and Section 17200 of the Business and Professions Code and one of the few cases limiting the scope of claims brought under the "unfairness" prong of Section 17200).
Mr. Floyd received his bachelor of arts degree in economics from the University of California at Los Angeles, where he graduated magna cum laude. Mr. Floyd received his law degree from the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law, where he graduated as a member of the Order of the Coif and was Managing Editor of the Industrial Relations Law Journal. After law school, he clerked one year for the Honorable Pamela Rymer, then of the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California. He is a co-author of several chapters of Securities Litigation: A Practical Guide, published by PLI in 2006, and has co-authored two articles on the federal securities laws. The first, "How Safe is the Safe Harbor?," concerning the recent federal securities reform legislation, was published in May 1995 in the Los Angeles Lawyer. The second article, titled "Secondary Liability Under Rule 10B-5: Still Alive And Well After Central Bank" was published in The Business Lawyer, Volume 52, No. 1 in November 1996, and has spoken in several programs on Class Action litigation. Mr. Floyd has also served on the Board of the Los Angeles Library Foundation, a nonprofit corporation supporting the Los Angeles Library system, and the Executive Advisory Board of the Asian Pacific American Legal Center.
Recent Publications
Current Trends in Federal Securities Litigation