Stephen Neal (lawyer)
American lawyer and chairman of multiple boards
Stephen C. Neal is an American attorney who is the chairman and former chief executive officer (CEO) of Cooley LLP, and former chairman of the board of directors of Levi Strauss & Co.
Career
Neal graduated from Harvard University with an AB in 1970 and from Stanford Law School with a JD in 1973.
In 1988, Neal successfully argued Grobow v. Perot, in which the Delaware Supreme Court upheld General Motors' buy-out of Ross Perot under the business judgment rule.
Neal joined Cooley in 1995, having previously been a partner at Kirkland and Ellis in Chicago. He was named chairman and CEO in 2001; he stepped down as CEO in 2007, but continues to hold the chairman position.
In 1998, Neal joined the board of trustees of the Monterey Bay Aquarium. He became vice chairman in 2005 and chairman in 2013.
In 2006 Stephen Neal was named by The National Law Journal as one of "The 100 Most Influential Lawyers in America". In September 2009, he was named in The Los Angeles Daily Journal's Top 100 Lawyers in California list.
The public source identifies “Stephen Neal (lawyer)” as american lawyer and chairman of multiple boards. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Stephen, Neal and lawyer.
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Biographical claims are most persuasive when dates, appointments and relationships can be traced to records created close to the events described. The source revision retrieved here is dated May 15, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q7610086. VIAF identifies the subject as 19599091. The Library of Congress control number is nr99019024. None of the 2 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1970, 1973, 1988 and 1995.
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This entry incorporates text from “Stephen Neal (lawyer)” 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.