John O'connor

John O’Connor is a highly accomplished, complex-case trial lawyer, who has represented both plaintiffs and defendants before juries and courts, state and federal, throughout the country for over fifty years. He has won numerous professional accolades, including consistent selection by his peers as a “Super Lawyer.” He is a former federal prosecutor who wrote key government “brainwashing” and psychiatric defense briefs in United States v. Patricia Hearst. As a private practice lawyer, he represented government regulatory agencies in the savings and loan crisis; a major tobacco company in smoking and health litigation; and NBA coach Don Nelson.

Perhaps his most well-known client was Mark Felt, a.k.a. Watergate’s “Deep Throat,” whom John had so identified in the 1970s and represented in his explosive revelatory article in Vanity Fair magazine.

John is a 1968 graduate of Notre Dame University, magna cum laude, and a 1972 graduate of the University of Michigan Law School, where he earned numerous honors, was an associate editor of the Michigan Law Review, and was selected to the Order of the Coif for graduating in the top 10 percent of his class.

He lives in Marin County, California, with his wife Jan, a sports marketing executive, and has three children: John W., president of a San Francisco investment fund; Christine, a senior federal criminal defense trial lawyer in Los Angeles; and Caroline, a vice president of a Fortune 500 company in San Francisco.