Dane Butswinkas, a civil and criminal litigator who last year helped thwart President Donald Trump’s attempt to crush a prominent U.S. law firm, has died. He was 65.
Mr. Butswinkas, a partner and former chairman of the prestigious Washington D.C. law firm Williams and Connolly, died Oct. 26 of a pulmonary embolism in Phoenix as he was preparing for trial, according to his family.
Mr. Butswinkas’s 37-year career was filled with high-profile cases and clients, including his successful 2015 defense of HBO against defamation charges for a report on the use of child labor, and his unsuccessful 2018 defense of Nicholas Slatten, a Blackwater security contractor accused of shooting unarmed civilians in Iraq. Slatten, who was sentenced to life in prison, was pardoned by Trump.
Mr. Butswinkas combined a brilliant legal mind with deep preparation and deft storytelling in the courtroom, according to lawyers who knew him. But perhaps his greatest skill, they said, was his ability to quickly connect with jurors and just about anyone else he met.
He was selected as a fellow of the American College of Trial Lawyers, an invitation-only organization reserved for the top 1 percent of his profession in each state.
For the HBO trial, he traveled to India on short notice to persuade a videographer critical to the case to testify, said Kevin Baine, a Williams and Connolly senior counsel who tried the case with him. After the decision, a woman juror asked whether he “was seeing anyone,” according to colleagues. Another exhorted his team to “keep up the good work,” they said.
“He just had a knack for taking a really complicated case and making it about something that people already believed,” said Steve Raber, his closest friend and senior counsel at Williams and Connolly.
Mr. Butswinkas’s wife, Janine Pierson, said in a statement that “Dane had a remarkable way of making everyone with whom he crossed paths feel seen and valued. But no one was luckier to be in his orbit than his family. Dane loved his family loudly, fiercely, and unabashedly.”
U.S. District Judge Ana C. Reyes, a former Williams and Connolly attorney, said Mr. Butswinkas was one of the lawyers who brought her to the firm, despite what she thought was a disastrous interview for a summer associate’s position.
“When he’s thinking about people, he thinks about who they are and what they’re about,” she said in an interview. “He could care less about what’s on a résumé. He’s thinking, ‘What is this person going to be like in front of a jury?’”
Dane Hal Butswinkas was born in Virginia Beach in 1961 to Jan Vernie Shackelford and raised by his mother and stepfather, Joseph T. Butswinkas, a naval officer who adopted him.
He excelled in sports in high school and played baseball at James Madison University. After earning a master’s degree in public policy from George Mason University, he attended law school at the University of Virginia, where he won a prestigious moot court competition.
He joined Williams and Connolly in 1989 and spent his entire career there, except for a two-month tenure as general counsel at Tesla that ended in early 2019.
Mr. Butswinkas was attracted to cases involving unpopular clients whom he thought were being treated unfairly, Baine said. Along with Slatten, those clients included a former Bear Stearns hedge fund manager acquitted in 2009 of attempting to defraud investors.
At the outset of his career, Mr. Butswinkas was on the team that defended Oliver North, the retired Marine Corps officer and National Security Council staffer accused of diverting funds from arms sales to Contra rebel groups in Nicaragua.
North was found guilty but the convictions were vacated in 1991.
Perhaps the most important case came in 2025, when Trump issued an executive order that stripped attorneys with the law firm Perkins Coie, now Ashurst Perkins Coie, of security clearances, barred their access to government buildings and canceled government contracts that sent them and their clients taxpayer dollars. Lawyers at the firm had hired a research company that helped compile unsubstantiated claims of possible ties between Trump’s 2016 campaign and Russia.
The order would have decimated the law firm’s ability to represent clients and deeply chilled the work of other attorneys. While some law firms capitulated to similar pressure by the president, Perkins Coie wanted to fight and hired Mr. Butswinkas as its lead attorney.
“Dane viewed this case as something he had an obligation to do without fear, without hesitation,” Raber said.
“Some people, when the chips are down, start looking for excuses or start looking for the exit,” he added. “That was not Dane.”
A U.S. district judge struck down the executive order as unconstitutional. The government has appealed.
Despite the gravity of the cases he took on, Mr. Butswinkas was a favorite among the firm’s young attorneys, who hoped to work with him. Reyes said any business trip with Mr. Butswinkas was marked by hard work and frequent laughter.
“If you were out with Dane it was just impossible not to have a good time,” Reyes said.
In addition to his wife, Mr. Butswinkas is survived by two children, Joseph Butswinkas and John Bailey Butswinkas; and his former wife and mother of their children, Megan Rupp.
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