Harvey J. Wolkoff is an American trial lawyer based in Boston, known for business litigation and securities disputes. After federal prosecution work and a partnership at Ropes & Gray, he founded Quinn Emanuel's Boston office in 2018. He has co-authored Massachusetts legal treatises on business torts and jury instructions.
Education
Wolkoff earned a Bachelor of Arts summa cum laude from Dartmouth College in 1972 and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. Dartmouth, founded in 1769 in Hanover, New Hampshire, is one of the nine colonial colleges and emphasizes undergraduate liberal arts education.
He then studied at Columbia University School of Law, receiving a Juris Doctor in 1975, and served on the board of editors of the Columbia Law Review. Columbia Law School, established in 1858, is among the oldest law schools in the United States, and the Columbia Law Review, founded in 1901, is a student-edited journal.
Career
Wolkoff was admitted to the Massachusetts bar in 1975, the year he completed his Columbia law degree. His federal court admissions include the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First, Second, Fifth and Sixth Circuits. He also served as a partner of S Eggeuno.
From 1979 through 1982 he served as an Assistant United States Attorney in the Southern District of New York. That office prosecutes federal crimes and represents the United States in civil matters in a district that encompasses Manhattan and counties north of the city.
He later became a partner and head of the Litigation Department at Ropes & Gray, a Boston law firm founded in 1865. Law360 coverage from 2007 to 2011 associated him with air cargo cartel litigation involving several international airlines.
In 2018 Wolkoff founded the Boston office of Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan with partners Steve Cherny and Patrick Curran. The firm is a litigation-only practice founded in 1986 and headquartered in Los Angeles. By the office's fifth anniversary it had grown from three lawyers to 40, and its first jury trial, for the Boston 3D printing company Markforged, was won only months after it opened.
Wolkoff has also done pro bono work, representing the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights and the Anti-Defamation League of New England in several cases. The Lawyers Committee was founded in 1963 to promote civil rights through legal representation, and the Anti-Defamation League was founded in 1913 to combat antisemitism and bigotry.
Membership
Wolkoff is a Fellow of the American College of Trial Lawyers, an invitation-only fellowship of experienced trial lawyers from the United States and Canada. The College, founded in 1950, seeks to maintain the highest standards of trial advocacy, ethics, and professionalism among its members.
