Recognized by Bloomberg as “one of the country’s preeminent corporate litigators,” William Savitt is Co-Chair of Gibson Dunn’s global Litigation Practice Group and a member of the Trials and Securities Litigation practice groups. Bill’s practice focuses on complex commercial litigation and the representation of corporations and directors in litigation involving mergers and acquisitions, proxy contests, corporate governance disputes, securities class actions, fiduciary-breach derivative actions, and regulatory enforcement actions relating to corporate transactions. He also regularly advises boards of directors in respect of strategic transactions, Caremark duties, and contests for corporate control.
Bill has played a leading role in many of the most consequential corporate and M&A disputes of recent years. Among other landmark Delaware cases, Bill acted as lead counsel in United Food & Commercial Workers Union v. Zuckerberg, which rewrote the corporate law rules governing derivative litigation; Corwin v. KKR Financial Holdings, which re-established the primacy of the shareholder vote in corporate litigation; and Third Point v. Ruprecht, which established the validity of the poison pill to defend against activist investor campaigns. Bill has also litigated many of the iconic MAE and contested-deal cases in the past decade, including representing Twitter in its successful lawsuit to compel closing of its $44 billion transaction in 2022, and leading the trial team in Martin Marietta v. Vulcan Materials, which remains the only case in which a court has enjoined a hostile tender offer. Bill represented OpenAI in its recent California trial that reshaped the AI industry; Coinbase in landmark litigation against the Securities and Exchange Commission in the Southern District of New York; and Meta and its directors in derivative litigation arising from Cambridge Analytica’s data-sharing controversy.* He has tried corporate disputes and argued appeals in federal and state courts around the country.
Bill has been profiled in The Financial Times, Business Insider, The Wall Street Journal, Lawdragon, Bloomberg Law, and The Verge, among other publications. Chambers and Partners ranked Bill as a “Star Individual” for securities litigation – the highest ranking available, reserved for a handful of practitioners – with clients noting that he “is a standout trial lawyer on big cases” and that “nobody could replace Bill.” He was named by Lawdragon as one of the 500 Leading Lawyers in the United States, 500 Leading Global Litigators, and 100 Leading AI & Legal Tech Advisors; to Benchmark Litigation’s Hall of Fame; and to the inaugural Forbes list of America’s Top 200 Lawyers. Bill is a member of the Council of the American Law Institute, the Board of Trustees of the Columbia Law Review, Inc., and the Dean’s Council of Columbia Law School. He is also a Fellow of the American College of Governance Counsel and a past executive director of Interfaith Hunger Appeal, a New York-based international hunger relief organization.
Bill received his B.A. from Brown University, magna cum laude, his M.Phil. from Columbia University, and his J.D. from Columbia Law School where he was Editor-in-Chief of the Columbia Law Review. After law school, he clerked for the Honorable Ruth Bader Ginsburg of the Supreme Court of the United States, and the Honorable Pierre N. Leval of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. Bill is an adjunct law professor at Columbia Law School in the field of transactional litigation. His scholarship on corporate and securities law topics has been published in the Columbia Law Review, the Virginia Law Review, the Cornell Law Review, the University of Texas Law Review, Business Law, and many other publications.
*Matters handled prior to joining Gibson Dunn
Capabilities
Credentials
Education:
- Columbia University - 1997 Juris Doctor
- Columbia University - 1994 Master of Philosophy
- Brown University - 1986 Magna Cum Laude
Admissions:
- New York Bar
Clerkships:
- US Supreme Court, Hon. Ruth Bader Ginsburg, 1998 - 1999
- US Court of Appeals, 2nd Circuit, Hon. Pierre N. Leval, 1997 - 1998