William P. Keane has extensive jury-trial experience obtained in 26 years of criminal and civil litigation practice. Mr. Keane chairs the firm’s Complex Litigation Department and the White Collar Crime and Internal Corporate Investigations Group. He is a Fellow of the American College of Trial Lawyers. He practices complex civil and criminal litigation with an emphasis in white collar criminal defense, commercial and intellectual property litigation, and corporate internal investigations. He has recently defended federal criminal and enforcement actions involving allegations of accounting and insider-trading fraud, Medicare fraud, tax violations, trade-secret theft, and antitrust violations and, on the civil side, has recently litigated patent-royalty and software-licensing disputes, among other intellectual property and business litigation matters.
Mr. Keane’s most recent trial defense was in the federal criminal prosecution of world-class track coach Trevor Graham for three false-statement charges arising out of the BALCO performance-enhancing drug investigation. U.S. v. Graham, U.S.D.C., N.D. of Cal., No. CR 06-0725 SI. Mr. Keane successfully obtained a hung jury on two of the three charges, including the primary count arising out of the government’s unproven allegations that Mr. Graham directed several of his athletes to obtain performance-enhancing drugs. Mr. Graham was convicted on a third count, but Mr. Keane successfully argued for probation and home detention rather than the imprisonment urged by the government.
Prior to joining the firm in 1997, Mr. Keane was an Assistant United States Attorney in the U.S. Attorney’s Silicon Valley Office in San Jose for more than six years, where he specialized in white collar criminal prosecutions. In his criminal defense practice, Mr. Keane has represented clients facing a broad range of criminal and civil-enforcement investigations and cases. He has extensive experience in defending clients in securities-fraud matters being investigated and charged by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and the U.S. Attorney's Office. He has also represented clients in criminal cases involving antitrust, Medicare fraud, environmental law, off-label marketing, tax violations, mail, wire and computer fraud, false claims, banking-regulation violations and export and money laundering violations. He regularly leads corporate internal investigations, including on accounting, fraud, FCPA and pharmaceutical-industry matters.
Mr. Keane’s civil practice involves representation of clients in a variety of complex business and commercial litigation matters, including bank failure litigation, false claims and complex contract disputes, and intellectual property matters involving patent royalties, trade-secret misappropriation, software licensing, and trademark and copyright. He has clients in the software, biotech, clean tech, Internet, information technology, online gaming and banking industries. He is currently defending a former bank officer named in litigation arising from a recent bank failure.
Mr. Keane is listed in The Best Lawyers in America in the field of White Collar Criminal Defense. He has been listed in Northern California Super Lawyers for a number of years running. He serves as a media legal analyst for the case of U.S. v. Barry Bonds, having appeared on a number of television news programs in the San Francisco Bay Area, including on KTVU Channel 2, NBC-11 and KRON4, as well as nationally on NBC’s Today Show. He has also provided commentary on the Roger Clemens trial and Lance Armstrong investigation. He is frequently quoted by numerous print and electronic news outlets, including the N.Y. Times, the Wall Street Journal, Sports Illustrated, USA Today, Bloomberg News, the San Francisco Chronicle, the San Jose Mercury News, and the legal dailies The Recorder and The Daily Journal. Mr. Keane also served as the technical legal and courtroom advisor to the director and writer of the independent movie “The Skeptic,” released in 2009.
Mr. Keane has taught Federal Criminal Law and Legal Writing as an adjunct professor at U.C. Hastings and is a frequent lecturer on white collar defense and commercial litigation strategies and legal-ethics issues. Mr. Keane also serves as a member of the Board of Directors of the Tony Patiño Fellowship, a non-profit corporation that awards law-school scholarships at U.C. Hastings, the University of Chicago, and Columbia University. He recently served a three-year term as a court-appointed Lawyer Representative to the Northern District of California Judicial Conference and also has been appointed by the same court to three terms as Criminal Justice Act counsel for indigent defendants.