charles p. diamond

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Chuck Diamond is a former senior partner of O’Melveny & Myers’ Century City litigation group, which he founded in the early 1980s. During his nearly 45-year O’Melveny career, his practice encompassed a wide variety of antitrust, commercial, and intellectual property disputes, with a pronounced emphasis on “big case” jury trial work. Since retiring from O’Melveny in 2017, he has been a full-time federal criminal defense lawyer to the indigent as a member of the Central District’s CJA Trial Attorney Panel. With the exception of two clients facing mandatory-minimum jail sentences (both of whom received the “minimum”), all of Diamond’s appointed clients have been acquitted, diverted or sentenced to probation. A racketeering acquittal returned in 2019 after 45 minutes of jury deliberation won Diamond and his team AmLaw's Litigation Daily "Litigator of the Week" award. 

Dubbed a “star litigator” by the San Francisco Chronicle and named repeatedly as one of California’s top antitrust litigators by Chambers USA and a “Top 100” California litigator by Los Angeles Business Journal, Diamond has been a Fellow in the prestigious American College of Trial Lawyers since 2007, where he chaired its National Moot Court Competition Committee and now vice-chairs its Public Defenders Committee. But he is best known in the legal community as a successful plaintiffs’ competition attorney. Notable achievements include the jury verdict Diamond and his team won in December 2016 for US Airways (now American Airlines), finding contract restrictions imposed by ticket-giant Sabre an unlawful restraint of trade in violation of the Sherman Act. The verdict marked a significant milestone in Diamond’s six-year effort to drive competition in the market for computerized networks that link travel agents with airlines and other travel suppliers. 

The Sabre victory was just one of Diamond’s successes taking on dominant firms. Before that he and his team won a record-setting US$1.25 billion settlement in 2011 for Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. in its long- running antitrust dispute with Intel Corp. over its exclusionary practices. Diamond both first-chaired the federal court litigation and developed and executed a global strategy of bringing pressure on Intel by instigating proceedings by competition authorities around the world. Those efforts led to rulings by the Japan Fair Trade Commission (2005), the Korean Fair Trade Commission (2008), and the European Commission (2009) that Intel had violated international norms for dominant firms, the imposition by the EC of the largest fine in the Commission's history, US$1.45 billion, a civil suit against Intel commenced on behalf of New York consumers by the New York Attorney General, and a formal investigation by the Federal Trade Commission that produced an industry-changing settlement. Before the Intel litigation, Diamond and another team won a US $192 million antitrust jury verdict against Silicon Valley’s Raychem Corp. for unlawfully monopolizing the resettable fuse industry using fraudulently-procured patents. 

Diamond’s resume of jury victories also includes back-to-back verdicts won for ExxonMobil in in connection with the grounding of the Exxon Valdez, where Alaskan juries rejected spill-related damage claims or found that Exxon had already fairly compensated the claimants. The National Law Journal ranked the second verdict among the “Top Defense Wins” of the year. As an entertainment litigator at the start of his legal career, Diamond is best known for long-running litigation for Paramount Pictures, where he and his team rebuffed Art Buchwald’s nationally televised attempt to win millions on account of Paramount’s accounting practices on the film Coming to America.

Diamond’s jury trial skills were honed in the 1980s as a court-appointed criminal defense lawyer in the Central District of California, when he defended over 50 major felonies and handled over a half-dozen criminal appeals, including a US Supreme Court argument in United States v. Gouveia, 467 U.S. 180 (1984). He subsequently defended corporations and individuals facing prosecution by the US Justice Department and a host of other federal agencies, including the Office of Foreign Assets Control, the Customs Service, the Postal Service, and the Fish and Wildlife Service. 

• Fellow, American College of Trial Lawyers (2007-present)
• “Leading Competition & Antitrust Lawyer,” Expert Guides (2010-2016) 
• “Champions of Children” Award, Children’s Institute Inc. (1990)  

Bar Admissions

• California

Court Admissions 

• US District Court for the Central District of California
• US Courts of Appeals for the Second and Ninth Circuits
• US Supreme Court  

• New York University, J.D., 1973: cum laude; Vanderbilt Medalist; Editor-in-Chief, New York University Law Review (1972-1973)  
• University of California at Los Angeles, B.A., Economics, 1969 
• US Army Military Police School, Augusta, GA, 1970  

Clerkships 

• Honorable William Matthew Byrne, Jr., US District Court for the Central District of California (1973- 1974)

Member

•  Indigent Defense Panel, Central District of California (1980-82, 2018 to the present) 
• Million Dollar Advocates Forum 
• Judge Pro Tem, Los Angeles and Beverly Hills Municipal and Superior Courts 
• Member and former Chair, Board of Trustees, Children’s Institute, Inc. (2010-present) 
• Trustee and Board Chair, Willows Community School, Culver City, CA (1997-2003)  

Guest Speaker

• The Today Show  
• ABC’s Prime Time  
• NBC’s Trial Watch  
• CNN  
• Fox News Network  
• Regular speaker on entertainment, technology and intellectual property litigation subjects, particularly studio profit participations and trial advocacy and strategy, including to the Association of Business Trial Lawyers, California CPA Continuing Education Foundation, National Institute of Trial Advocacy, CA State Bar, Antitrust Section