Robert King, now retired, formerly was Managing Partner for eight years of the Los Angeles office of Debevoise. He had rejoined the New York office in 1996 as a senior litigation partner. Mr. King joined Debevoise in 1960 and, with the exception noted below, has spent his entire career at Debevoise until he retired in 2003. He is a 1960 graduate of the Stanford Law School, where he was a member of the Stanford Law Review. From 1964 to 1967, he served as an Assistant United States Attorney in the Criminal Division of the United States Attorney’s office in the Southern District of New York. He has been a trial lawyer for over 35 years and a Fellow of the American College of Trial Lawyers since 1983.
Mr. King’s litigation experience has combined trial work (including substantial jury trial work) with complex business disputes in areas such as securities fraud (including class and shareholder derivative actions), professional liability (particularly accountants’ liability), and construction and insurance coverage disputes. As an Assistant United States Attorney, he prosecuted fraud and bribery cases and handled a major post-conviction motion in the Rosenberg-Sobell espionage case. Mr. King also has had extensive experience in the preparation of expert testimony and the examination and cross-examination of expert witnesses.
Alternative Dispute Resolution is a field that Mr. King knows well. He headed the firm’s ADR practice group, was a principal author of the firm’s ADR Screen and Workbook (a widely publicized tool for evaluating cases for their potential for resolution by ADR), has acted as an advocate in a wide variety of mediation and other ADR proceedings and has served on many committees of the CPR Institute for Dispute Resolution. He has also been actively involved in international and domestic arbitration and has served on the Board of Directors of the LA Center for International Commercial Arbitration, on the Advisory Council of the Asia/Pacific Center for the Resolution of International Business Disputes in San Francisco, and as an Affiliate of the Stanford Center on Conflict and Negotiation.
Mr. King is a member of the Association of the Bar of the City of New York (Federal Courts Committee), the State Bars of New York and California, the U.S. Supreme Court Bar, the Bars of numerous federal courts and the American Bar Association.