Layn R. Phillips

Layn R. Phillips, born 1952, is a former litigation partner in the Newport Beach office of Irell & Manella LLP. He is both a former United States Attorney and a former United States District Judge.

Judge Phillips joined the United States Attorney’s office in Los Angeles in 1980 as an Assistant United States Attorney, serving as a federal prosecutor in the Central District of California for four years. During the Reagan administration, he returned to his home state of Oklahoma, where, at age 31, he was nominated to serve as a United States Attorney.

At age 34, he again was nominated by President Reagan to serve as a United States District Judge in Oklahoma City. During his four years on the bench, he presided over more than 140 federal trials in Oklahoma, New Mexico, and Texas. He also sat by designation on the United States Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit in Denver, Colorado, where he participated in numerous panel decisions and published several opinions in the fields of criminal law, business litigation, and civil rights.

For his years of commitment to public service, in 1989 he was named as one of the 10 Outstanding Young Americans by the U.S. Junior Chamber of Commerce. In 1991, he resigned from the federal bench and joined Irell & Manella, where he specializes in complex civil litigation, internal investigations, and alternative dispute resolution. As a result of his trial work, in 1997 Judge Phillips was elected into the American College of Trial Lawyers. He has the dual honor of being named by LawDra;n in 2006 as one of the “Leading Judges in America” and as one of the “Leading Litigation Attorneys in America.”

The Los Angeles Daily Journal named Judge Phillips as one of California’s 100 most influential lawyers in 2008. In addition, he was selected for inclusion in The Best Lawyers in America for alternative dispute resolution every year since 2009 and has been named Best Lawyers’ 2013 Orange County Arbitration “Lawyer of the Year.” Only a single lawyer in each specialty in each community is honored as the “Lawyer of the Year.” Also in 2013, he was selected as one of the “Top 50 Lawyers in Orange County” for the eighth consecutive year and named to the Southern California “Super Lawyers” list for the tenth year by Los Angeles Magazine.

Judge Phillips received both his B.S. and J.D. from the University of Tulsa where he received the Robert Butler Award for Outstanding Legal Writing. He also completed two years of an LLM program at Georgetown University Law Center in the field of antitrust and economic regulation of industry.

Judge Phillips has also been inducted into the University of Tulsa Athletic Hall of Fame. He was a four-year letter winner in tennis, serving as the captain of the men’s varsity team and winning the NCAA Missouri Valley Conference Championship at #1 singles.