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Daniel Purcell
Partner

Email: dpurcell@kvn.com
Tel: 415.391.5400

Education:
Boalt Hall School of Law, University of California at Berkeley, 1997
Amherst College, 1992

Daniel Purcell joined Keker & Van Nest in 1999, becoming a partner in 2005. His practice primarily focuses on antitrust and legal-malpractice matters, but he represents individuals and corporations in all types of complex litigation matters, including patent, trade-secret, and general commercial disputes.

Dan is currently defending a major auto manufacturer in an antitrust consumer class action, a national law firm in a legal malpractice case arising out of patent litigation, and a pharmaceutical manufacturer in a patent-infringement suit arising out of an application to market a generic anti-depressant. Recently, he served as lead counsel for 18 individuals accused of trade-secret misappropriation in connection with their movement from one insurance-brokerage firm to another. His other recent representations include a software manufacturer suing former employees for trade-secret theft in connection with movement to a large Internet service provider, a credit-card network in an antitrust suit brought by competing networks, and a semiconductor manufacturer in both federal district court and before a federal administrative agency in trade-secret and patent lawsuits against a competitor.

Dan also maintains an active pro bono practice. In 2003, he was part of the team that won the release from prison of John Tennison, who had been wrongly convicted of murder in 1990 and was subsequently exonerated by the California trial court that had convicted him. He is currently representing Mr. Tennison in a civil-rights lawsuit against the City and County of San Francisco. He is also representing another wrongly-convicted man in habeas-corpus litigation before the California Supreme Court. Between 2001 and 2007, he served as lead counsel for a California environmental group in a Clean Water Act lawsuit alleging pollution by a major agribusiness concern, both in federal district court (where his client prevailed on summary judgment) and before the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals.

Dan graduated magna cum laude from Amherst College in 1992 and received his law degree from Boalt Hall School of Law at the University of California at Berkeley in 1997. While at Boalt, he served as an articles editor of the California Law Review and won the James Patterson McBaine Honors Moot Court Competition. He is the author of "The Public Right to Precedent: A Theory and Rejection of Settlement Conditioned on Vacatur," 85 Calif. L. Rev. 867 (1997). Prior to joining Keker & Van Nest, he worked for one year at Heller Ehrman in San Francisco, and clerked for Judge David F. Levi of the United States District Court for the Eastern District of California.

Dan lives in Oakland with his wife.