Board of Directors

William P. Keane

William KeaneHastings 1986

Bill is a litigation partner at Farella Braun + Martel LLP with extensive jury-trial experience obtained in over 20 years of civil and criminal practice.  He practices complex civil and criminal litigation with an emphasis in white collar criminal defense and intellectual property.

Bill chairs the firm’s White Collar Crime Practice Group. Bill has recently defended federal criminal and civil-enforcement actions involving allegations of accounting and insider-trading fraud, trade-secret theft and antitrust violations.  He has also recently conducted corporate internal investigations arising from accounting and other financial-reporting issues and FDA-compliance issues in the pharmaceutical industry.  On the civil side, he has recently litigated patent-royalty and software-licensing disputes, among other intellectual property matters.

Bill has taught Federal Criminal Law and Legal Writing as an adjunct professor of law at Hastings College of the Law and is a frequent lecturer on white collar defense and legal ethics issues.  He has also served as a courtroom technical advisor for an independent film still in production.

From 1991-97, Bill was an Assistant United States Attorney in the U.S. Attorney’s Silicon Valley Office in San Jose, where he specialized in white collar criminal prosecutions.  From 1986-97, he was an associate at the Sedgwick and Cobletz law firms, both in San Francisco.  In 1986-87, Bill was a law clerk for the Honorable Eugene F. Lynch of the U.S. Northern District of California.

Bill is a 1986 Tony Patiño Fellow from Hastings College of the Law, where he served as the editor-in-chief for the Hastings Law Journal.  In 1982, he received his B.A. in political science from the University of California at Berkeley.

Bill has been on the Board of Directors for many years, and currently is Chairperson of the Board’s Finance Committee.