Tuesday, August 19, 2014
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Ex-Prosecutor Tapped for Northern District Judgeship
By a MetNews Staff Writer
President Obama said yesterday he intends to nominate Haywood S. Gilliam Jr. to the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California.
Gilliam has been a partner at Covington & Burling LLP since 2009, where he is vice-chair of the firm’s White Collar Defense and Investigations practice group. From 2006 to 2009, he was a partner at Bingham McCutchen LLP.
Gilliam was an assistant U.S. attorney in the Northern District from 1999 to 2006, serving as chief of the Securities Fraud Section from 2004 to 2006. He worked at McCutchen, Doyle, Brown & Enersen from 1995 to 1998 and served as a law clerk to Judge Thelton E. Henderson of Northern District Court of California from 1994 to 1995.
He is a graduate of Yale University and Stanford Law School, and has served as a lawyer representative to the Ninth Circuit Judicial Conference; on the Northern District of California Magistrate Judge Merit Selection Panel, which he chaired in 2013; and on the Stanford Law School Board of Visitors. He was also co-chair of the law school’s San Francisco Alumni Chapter for the past two years
He won the Thomas I. Atkins Civil Rights Award from the San Francisco NAACP in 1998 and is a longtime board member of the Wiley Manuel Law Foundation in Oakland and served on the East Bay Community Law Center’s Advisory Board.
Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., said in a statement:
“I recommended Haywood Gilliam to the president for this important position. Mr. Gilliam’s broad and impressive legal experience, ranging from federal prosecutor to a partner at a major law firm, will be a strong addition to the federal bench in northern California. I am confident he will serve with great distinction….
“Filling this position is a priority because the Northern District of California has a significant caseload. The court has averaged more than 640 weighted filings per authorized judgeship—22 percent above the national average and well over the threshold set by the Judicial Conference of the United States for a ‘judicial emergency.’ Since 2011, the time for a civil case to get to trial has risen by 61 percent—from 21.2 months to 34.2 months.”
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