Blaine H. Evanson is a litigation associate in the Los Angeles office of Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher. He practices in the firm’s Appellate and Constitutional Law and Class Actions practice groups, focusing on complex commercial litigation at both the trial and appellate levels.
Mr. Evanson has represented clients in a wide variety of appellate matters in both federal and state courts, including the areas of class certification, punitive damages, employment law, product liability, intellectual property, securities law, and constitutional law. Recent representative appellate matters include persuading the Ninth Circuit to reverse a grant of summary judgment and vacate an award of attorneys’ fees in a multi-million-dollar breach-of-contract dispute, obtaining a reversal from the Federal Circuit in a patent case involving standing under California’s Unfair Competition Law, securing interlocutory review from the Ninth Circuit of a major wage-and-hour class action on the eve of trial, obtaining a remand from the Fourth Circuit on behalf of a newspaper reporter seeking access to sealed legal proceedings, and defeating an appeal brought in the Ninth Circuit by a major insurer against a well-known reinsurer.
Prior to joining the firm, Mr. Evanson served as a law clerk for Judge A. Raymond Randolph of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. He graduated from Columbia Law School in 2006, where he was a James Kent Scholar, a Senior Editor on the Columbia Law Review, and the recipient of the best brief award in Columbia’s Harlan Fiske Stone Moot Court. Mr. Evanson received his Bachelor of Science degree in Information Systems, with University Honors, from Brigham Young University in 2003.
Mr. Evanson has taught courses on constitutional law and appellate advocacy at the University of Southern California and Loyola Law Schools, and has lectured and written on a variety of subjects, including punitive damages, class actions, and constitutional law. He has been named a “Rising Star” in the area of appellate litigation every year since 2010 by the Southern California “Superlawyers” edition of Los Angeles magazine.
Mr. Evanson is a member of the California bar, admitted to practice before the U.S. Supreme Court, the U.S. Courts of Appeals for the Fifth, Ninth, Tenth, Federal, and D.C. Circuits, and the U.S. District Courts for the Central and Northern Districts of California.