24 Aug 2026
Paul Weiss Welcomes William M. Jay as Head of Supreme Court & Appellate Litigation Practice in Washington, D.C.
"Paul Weiss has hired William M. Jay as partner and head of its Supreme Court & Appellate Litigation Practice in Washington, D.C.; he will focus on Supreme Court and appellate litigation, with emphasis on intellectual property."
A former Supreme Court clerk and Assistant to the Solicitor General, Jay has extensive experience handling complex appeals before the U.S. Supreme Court and every federal court of appeals. He has delivered more than 100 oral arguments before the U.S. Supreme Court and federal and state courts of appeals, including 19 arguments before the U.S. Supreme Court, and has briefed more than 65 Supreme Court cases on the merits and over 150 at the certiorari stage.
Jay’s practice encompasses Supreme Court and appellate litigation across a broad range of areas, including intellectual property (patent, copyright and trademark), financial services, class actions and mass torts, administrative law, antitrust, securities litigation, and constitutional challenges to state law. He is also a prominent advocate at the Federal Circuit and is regularly retained at the trial stage to handle critical motions and to shape strategy for eventual appeal.
Jay joins Paul Weiss as partner and head of the Supreme Court & Appellate Litigation Practice. He has been widely recognized for his appellate work, including Benchmark Litigation’s nationwide Appellate Litigator of the Year (2020), listings in The Legal 500 Hall of Fame for Appellate (2021–2026), and Band 1 rankings in Chambers USA for Appellate Law and Intellectual Property: Appellate. He holds an A.B. from Harvard College and a J.D. from Harvard Law School, where he served as an executive editor of the Harvard Law Review.