# Judge slams Silicon Valley lawyers’ ‘deeply disturbing’ behavior, orders law firm to pay $3 million to Palo Alto biotech company > Source: > Published: 2026-05-27 23:02:54+00:00 **Getting your** [Trinity Audio](//trinityaudio.ai)player ready...A federal court judge hit a high-flying law firm with a $3 million penalty as he condemned four of its high-ranking Silicon Valley attorneys for engaging in “a culture of lawyering that is deeply disturbing.” Law firm Quinn Emanuel was defending Texas biotech company Natera against claims by its Palo Alto rival Guardant Health that Natera used false and misleading advertising to undercut sales of Guardant’s cancer test. Judge Edward Chen in San Francisco U.S. District Court said four partners from Quinn Emanuel’s Silicon Valley office provided misleading statements to the court about how the firm obtained confidential data related to Guardant’s product. “At virtually every juncture in this misadventure, these attorneys turned a blind eye to the truth, deliberately failed to exercise diligence, violated their duties of candor to the Court, and then attempted to justify it,” Chen’s scathing, 15-page order said. Chen ordered Quinn Emanuel — a Los Angeles-headquartered company with 33 offices in a dozen countries — to pay $3 million to Guardant, and also hit the law firm with a $100,000 punitive fine. “Three million dollars is a very large sanction — we rarely see sanctions of that size,” said Santa Clara University School of Law professor Eric Goldman. Quinn Emanuel said in a statement Wednesday that it was “deeply disappointed by the conduct described in the judge’s order.” The firm and the lawyers involved have apologized to Chen, Quinn Emanuel said.The $3 million was intended to pay Guardant back for the legal fees it incurred as a result of Quinn Emanuel lawyers’ actions, Goldman added. The judge recommended specific amounts for two of the firm’s partners to pay — up to $58,000 by Andrew Bramhall and Brian Cannon — and said the shares apportioned to the other two partners, Margaret Shyr and Victoria Maroulis, would be determined later. Chen apportioned Quinn Emanuel associate Elle Wang, the partners’ subordinate, a share of up to $29,000. Under Chen’s May 19 order, Quinn Emanuel is responsible for paying all the sanctions, and can choose whether to make the four partners and Wang pay the recommended sums, Goldman said. Bramhall, Cannon and Wang were ordered to take eight hours of ethics training, with Quinn Emanuel tasked with creating their training curriculum. The three, along with Shyr and Maroulis, would be reported to The State Bar of California, which licenses and disciplines lawyers. “Though each attorney culpable bears individual responsibility for their actions, their conduct implicates a culture of lawyering that is deeply disturbing,” Chen said in his order. “It is a culture that takes refuge in lawyering finesse and prioritizes winning motions over acting ethically.” Such behavior drags out court proceedings, drives up costs, and erodes trust in lawyers, Chen said. “The judge’s order was strongly worded and obviously a mix of exasperation and anger,” Goldman said. Quinn Emanuel, with more than 1,300 lawyers world-wide, refers to itself online as the law firm “most feared globally by large businesses.” The company is known for high-profile cases including representing Harvard University against the Trump administration over foreign-student admissions and federal mandates on enrollment and hiring, and representing, for free, Salvadoran immigrant Kilmar Abrego Garcia, who was illegally deported to El Salvador last year. In the case that led to the large sanction, Quinn Emanuel’s client Natera needed to show that science backed up the advertising statements its rival Guardant alleged were false and misleading, Chen noted in his order. The expert witness provided Wang with a memo containing data from a confidential clinical trial of Guardant’s cancer test that could have been a “game-changer” for Wang and her Quinn Emanuel team, Chen said. Bramhall, who was Wang’s supervisor, did not seem concerned that the firm’s expert witness had obtained confidential clinical data despite not being part of the trial, Chen wrote. Bramhall told Wang to convert the memo into an expert-witness report. Shyr, reviewing the report, asked Wang why there were no sources given for the clinical trial data, and Wang responded that the expert provided the data in confidence, and that she hoped it would become public when a paper was published at an upcoming conference. Shyr asked Wang how the expert obtained confidential data. “But she is not interested in pursuing this potential ethical problem further,” Chen said. Shyr closed the conversation by saying, “Maybe I don’t want to know,” Chen said. In a hearing, Guardant claimed the expert witness received the paper six weeks before the conference. Cannon told the court he wasn’t aware that the expert had “any sort of early access to the data.” That was true at the time, Chen said, but Shyr and Wang knew the expert had obtained confidential data before the paper was released, and didn’t correct the record. Nor did anyone else at Quinn Emanuel once the firm learned about the early access, Chen said. On top of implementing court-ordered “corrective actions,” the firm will send one of its executive committee members to each of Quinn Emanuel’s U.S. offices to “emphasize the firm’s rejection of the conduct that Judge Chen described,” Quinn Emanuel said. The firm will add a lawyer to its internal legal department, who will be devoted to advising its attorneys “who face questions about disclosures to the Court,” Quinn Emanuel said. “While winning for clients is important,” the firm said, “we know that our lawyers must always, first and foremost, abide by their ethical duties.” Goldman said he didn’t believe Chen’s findings and sanctions order would damage Quinn Emanuel’s reputation. “Clients want aggressive lawyers,” Goldman said. “It’s not clear to me that any client would view this as problematic. You go to Quinn Emanuel because you want to win.”