About

Donald Norris leads Enso Law’s multidistrict litigation and class action practice. For more than four decades, he has taken on powerful institutions, whether a consumer products giant, a national organization, or a city government, when they hurt people and refuse to answer for it.

His mass tort and MDL work includes talc powder cancer litigation, AndroGel testosterone cases, and Boy Scouts of America childhood sexual abuse claims. He also filed a federal litigation challenging the City of Los Angeles’s late-payment penalties on parking tickets as an unconstitutional excessive fine, a case that has been to the Ninth Circuit twice.

Civil rights work has been central to his practice since the early 1990s. Mr. Norris represented the passengers in the Rodney King civil litigation. He tried to verdict a case against the City of Los Angeles for a man framed by police for a robbery he did not commit, and he won a jury verdict for an Olympic gold medalist unlawfully arrested by LAPD. He also worked on class actions against the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department and the County jail system that produced institutional reforms and recoveries of $7.5 million and $27 million.

Before joining Enso, Mr. Norris spent decades in the highest levels of commercial litigation as a partner at Patterson, Belknap, Webb & Tyler. There he represented an investment bank in securities litigation involving billions of dollars in claims, and he served as lead counsel in a case involving $500 million in claims arising from the collapse of a savings and loan.

His commercial and intellectual property work has included:

• co-lead counsel in a civil RICO and antitrust case against major insurance companies;
• lead defense counsel in a civil RICO case seeking $600 million;
• defense of a global music company in an antitrust case;
• defense of an internet gatekeeper against copyright claims;
• a successful defense of a design patent claim for one of the world’s largest sunglasses makers;
• a copyright action against the world’s largest toy company;
• false advertising and trademark claims for an international health products company; and
• a $20 million television advertising dispute for a major media company.

His clients have included major film studios, television networks, music companies, pharmaceutical and medical technology companies, hospitals, and prominent entertainers, including in a defamation case and in a case against a business manager for malfeasance.

Mr. Norris has tried more than 60 cases, including more than 30 jury trials, and has argued appeals in state and federal courts. He is a graduate of Stanford Law School, where he was an editor of the Stanford Journal of International Law. He clerked for the Honorable Lawrence T. Lydick of the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California. He is admitted to practice in California and before the Ninth Circuit and the Northern, Southern, Eastern, and Central Districts of California. He served for years as a Los Angeles Superior Court arbitrator and mediator, and he speaks Spanish.

At Enso, he brings that experience to a firm built on one conviction: The law is a powerful tool for positive change.

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