David James Zugman

I live and breathe federal criminal defense. I have read every Supreme Court opinion and every 9th Circuit published opinion (and most of the unpublished) since 1997. 

I have been an inordinantely succesful appellate attorney. The 9th Circuit reports that it reversed 7.7% of cases in 2012 (national average 6.8) . In the cases I have handled -- i.e. I wrote the briefs or argued the matter -- the reversal rate is triple that. I have been fortunate to have found a lot of interesting issues, but I also spend a substantial amount of time learning in order to bring future challenges to convictions.

I love doing trials, but I am a sentencing specialist. There is no way to know whether it my advocacy, the prosecutor's discretion, or a judge's mercy that causes a particularly low sentence, but I have been very fortunate in my career. In every case, I give my client a best and worst case scenario. I do this to give my client an expectation about what is possible and what is realistic.

Every time I go before the courts, I feel like I am the one on trial or being sentenced and I approach the matter in the way that minimizes my client's exposure. In this business, the number of days of incarceration gives a simple barometer to decide success. And I have had more than my share of success.

In my limited free time, I crossfit, play memory games, and am a lumosity devotee (my overall BPI is 1506/99.5 for any fellow lumosity folks.)