William F. Lee

Bill Lee is a partner at WilmerHale and is one of the country’s foremost trial, appellate and intellectual property lawyers. He has tried more than 200 cases, both jury and jury-waived, to judgment and argued more than 100 appeals before the Court of Appeals. Bill has been awarded a lifetime achievement award by the American Lawyer and was selected as one of the National Law Journal’s 100 Most Influential Lawyers in America; one of The American Lawyer’s Litigators of the Year; the outstanding US IP Practitioner by Managing IP; and one of the fifty most powerful people in Boston by the Boston Business Journal.

Bill was lead trial counsel for Harvard in the case attacking its race conscious admissions policy. He also served as lead trial counsel for Apple in its worldwide litigation with Samsung, and was lead trial counsel for Broadcom in the highly publicized cases between Broadcom and Qualcomm. He also represented Pfizer in a trial that, after seven days, resulted in a settlement of $2.15 billion.

From July 1987 through June 1989, Bill served as associate counsel to Independent Counsel Lawrence E. Walsh in the Iran-Contra investigation. In that capacity, Bill was responsible for certain portions of the grand jury investigation and resulting indictments. He has also served as a special assistant to the Massachusetts Attorney General for the purpose of investigating alleged incidents of racial bias in the Commonwealth’s courts.

Bill served as the managing and co-managing partner at WilmerHale from 2000 to 2012 and was managing partner at the time of the merger of Wilmer Cutler and Pickering and Hale and Dorr.

Bill was the Senior Fellow of the Harvard Corporation and the Eli Goldston Lecturer at Harvard Law School. He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American College of Trial Lawyers.