John Keker honored court historical societies for professionalism

John W. Keker – an outsized figure in the Bay Area legal community for five decades – was honored this week by the Ninth Judicial Circuit Historical Society and the Northern District Historical Society.

The Bill Edlund Award for Professionalism recognizes excellence as a lawyer in written and oral advocacy, civility, commitment to the legal profession and leadership in the community. Tuesday’s ceremony was held at the James R. Browning Courthouse in San Francisco.

“It’s a matter of great honor and pride to have the historical society say something nice about my 51 years of practicing law in the Northern District of California,” Keker said in an interview.

“I came into litigation after law school. Not until I graduated did I decide I wanted to be a trial lawyer,” he continued. “Lots of people think they want to be trial lawyers and then come to realize it can be pretty stressful. However, some people thrive in that environment and I was one of them.”

Keker, who built Keker, Van Nest & Peters into one of the nation’s powerhouse litigation boutiques, also reflected on the importance of his trial work in the context of its role in society.

“Trials are going to be with us forever and the world would be a worse place if every dispute was mediated, arbitrated or settled,” he said. “Trials are both fun for the lawyers and important for our society to properly decide things.”

Keker first came to national prominence in 1989 when he led Independent Counsel Lawrence Walsh’s prosecution of Lt. Col. Oliver North over the Iran-Contra Affair. Since then, he and the lawyers at the 120-attorney firm have represented some of the nation’s biggest corporations in bet-the-company litigation. But he also has waged high-profile battles on behalf of immigrant rights, civil rights and the environment.

Earlier this year, Keker and his team won a $24 million jury award in Miami for the families of four people who were either killed or tortured in the Trelew Massacre, where 16 political prisoners in Argentina were murdered in August 1972.

Representing Santa Clara County, he won a nationwide injunction in 2017 that blocked President Donald Trump’s executive order to defund governments deemed to be “sanctuary jurisdictions.”

He and his team represented the Wetlands Preservation Foundation, a non-profit dedicated to preserving the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta in a successful trial against the California Department of Water Resources and The Nature Conservancy for their mismanagement of 9000-acre Staten Island, in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta.

He is currently part of a team that includes the California attorney general and San Francisco district attorney suing three ghost gun manufacturers.