Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan
American law firm
Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan, LLP is an American white-shoe law firm headquartered in Los Angeles, California. The firm employs approximately 1,000 attorneys throughout 35 offices around the world.
History
The firm was established in 1986 by John B. Quinn, Eric Emanuel, David Quinto, and Phyllis Kupferstein, with the purpose of being a litigation-only firm. In 1988, A. William "Bill" Urquhart decided to join the two-year-old firm, which became Quinn Emanuel & Urquhart, and soon later Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Oliver with the addition of Dale Hugh Oliver. Another name partner George Hedges was hired in 1998 to increase the firm's Hollywood presence, and the firm was known as Quinn Emanuel Urquhart Oliver & Hedges for over a decade.
Quinn Emanuel is the first AmLaw 100 firm to have a female name partner. The firm changed its name in March 2010 to include Kathleen Sullivan, former Dean of Stanford Law School, who heads the firm's appellate practice.
In 2014, the firm was the subject of a Freedom of Information Act request by Microsoft, in connection with a contract it had supposedly signed with the IRS.
Intellectual property litigation is the firm's largest practice area and the firm currently has over 200 lawyers who litigate IP cases. Quinn Emanuel represented the Winklevoss twins' social network, ConnectU, in its lawsuit that accused Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg of stealing ideas for his own social network. The parties reached a confidential settlement, yet Quinn Emanuel later revealed the confidential settlement amount of $65 million in a firm advertisement.
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Chronology, provenance and viewpoint should be read together before a broad social or political interpretation is accepted. The source revision retrieved here is dated Mar 26, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q7272267. 2 of 2 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1986, 1988, 1998 and 2010.
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This entry incorporates text from “Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.