Practice/Organization Description
David Newdorf has been a civil trial lawyer in San Francisco for 13 years. Since 2001, he has been a Deputy City Attorney on the trial team of the San Francisco City Attorney’s Office. He defends the City in police civil rights claims, class actions and complex commercial disputes. He practices in both state and federal court at the trial and appellate levels.
Mr. Newdorf joined the City Attorney’s Office to get inside a courtroom on a regular basis and to try cases. Before joining the office, he was a litigation associate at O’Melveny & Myers LLP in San Francisco from 1994 to 2001.
At O’Melveny, he managed to get himself lent out to the City Attorney’s Office to handle a trial — a high-speed motor vehicle collision involving plaintiffs and an S.F.P.D. patrol car responding to a shooting call.
He got his first taste for trial work at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles, where the late Bill Hobbs taught an intensive trial advocacy class. The class was followed by an internship at the East Los Angeles Branch of the L.A. District Attorney’s Office. He was able to personally handle, under the supervision of a deputy D.A., felony preliminary hearings (mostly small drug offenses) and one misdemeanor DUI jury trial. (Defendant was convicted.)
Very early in his career (1995-96), he took a one-year hiatus from O’Melveny to clerk for Judge Charles A. Legge in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California. It was there he got his first exposure to civil rights cases, which led to pro bono work at O’Melveny and more recently to his focus on police civil rights cases at the City. After court, Judge Legge would light up a pipe in chambers and regale the law clerks with trial stories from his days at Bronson Bronson & McKinnon (now defunct). The San Francisco legal community of Judge Legge’s early years seemed parochial and clubby compared to the bar today. These stories instilled in him an appreciation for local traditions, collegiality and a sense that San Francisco trial lawyers are part of a legal community with a proud history.
