Most law firms start with a business plan. Greenberg Gross LLP started with a jury verdict. In 2013, after Wayne Gross secured a $50 million jury verdict for a client in a dispute over the Hollywood Palladium redevelopment, that client encouraged him and his colleague Alan Greenberg to strike out on their own rather than keep trying cases like it under someone else’s name.
A Childhood That Built Toughness Early
Gross grew up an orphan in a working-class San Francisco neighborhood, a background he’s said instilled a toughness that later showed up in how he approaches a courtroom. He earned his undergraduate degree, cum laude, from the University of San Francisco in 1985, then went on to UC Hastings College of the Law, graduating magna cum laude in 1988. He clerked for U.S. District Court Judge Laughlin E. Waters before moving into a career that would eventually put him on the other side of the courtroom from where he started. It’s not the background most people picture when they imagine a founding partner at a boutique litigation firm, and Gross has pointed to it directly when explaining why mentoring newer attorneys, particularly those without an obvious path into the profession, has stayed a consistent part of his career alongside the casework itself.
Learning to Build a Case as a Federal Prosecutor
Before he represented plaintiffs, Gross spent years as a supervisory federal prosecutor in Los Angeles and Orange County, handling financial fraud and healthcare fraud cases for the U.S. Attorney’s Office. That work taught him how to build a complex fraud case from the ground up, tracing paper trails and financial records back to the people responsible rather than starting from an obvious smoking gun. Financial fraud prosecutions in particular require reconstructing a company’s internal decision-making after the fact, often from incomplete records that were never meant to be read by an outside investigator, a skill set that translates directly into the kind of business litigation and securities cases he handles today. He left government service in 2007. His prosecutorial work earned him recognition from two U.S. Attorneys General and the FBI Director, a level of institutional recognition that’s rare for an attorney who has since spent nearly two decades in private practice.
What Prosecutors Bring to Civil Litigation That Career Litigators Sometimes Don’t
A former federal prosecutor evaluates a case differently than someone who has only ever worked one side of civil litigation. Prosecutors are trained to build a case methodically before ever filing charges, gathering and organizing evidence to the point where the story tells itself to a jury, rather than filing first and figuring out the theory later. That discipline carries over into civil practice as an instinct for building a documentary record early, identifying the internal communications and financial records that will matter before opposing counsel has a chance to bury them in a larger production, and structuring a case around the version of events a jury can follow without a law degree.
The Verdict That Started the Firm
After the $50 million verdict, Gross and Alan Greenberg, a litigator with his own background handling complex business and finance cases from his years on Wall Street and in Orange County litigation boutiques, founded Greenberg Gross LLP in April 2013. Greenberg has described the decision as a chance to escape the restrictions of a large firm: freedom to take on whatever case the two of them believed was worth their time, rather than whatever a larger institution’s client list happened to include. The firm grew from a single Orange County office on the 17th floor of Costa Mesa’s Center Tower into locations across California, Nevada, New York, New Jersey, and Massachusetts, expansion Gross has attributed to both a growing client base and a deliberate effort to take on cases with broader public impact.
Two Different Lenses on the Same Kind of Case
Gross’s practice today spans business and class action litigation, employment disputes, securities and financial services matters, professional liability defense, real estate litigation, and white collar criminal defense, along with corporate crisis management and internal investigations. Pairing a former federal fraud prosecutor with a litigator whose background is in complex business and finance cases gives the firm two different ways of taking apart the same kind of institutional misconduct: one shaped by building a criminal case against a company from the outside, the other by unwinding a disputed transaction or compensation structure from the inside. Corporate crisis management and internal investigations, an area Gross handles directly, draws on that prosecutorial instinct in a different context entirely, since a company facing a potential government investigation needs the same kind of methodical fact-gathering Gross once did on the government’s side, just aimed at getting ahead of a problem before regulators do.
What Securities and Financial Services Litigation Involves
Gross’s securities and financial services practice draws directly on his prosecutorial background in financial fraud. These cases typically involve disputes over whether an investment was misrepresented, whether a financial advisor breached a duty owed to a client, or whether a company’s public statements about its own finances were accurate at the time they were made. Proving any of those claims usually requires reconstructing what people inside a company actually knew and when they knew it, using internal emails, board minutes, and financial records, the same kind of reconstruction Gross once did as a prosecutor trying to establish criminal intent. The difference in civil practice is the standard of proof and the remedy sought, but the investigative approach carries over largely intact.
A Shared Vision That Became a Firm
Greenberg and Gross have described their partnership as built on a shared vision for how complex business cases should be tried, a phrase that undersells how different their two backgrounds actually were before they met at the same international law firm. One had spent years negotiating deals and then litigating disputes over them; the other had spent years building government cases against the kind of companies that later became the clients of a plaintiff-focused firm. Rather than smoothing over that difference, Greenberg Gross has built its identity around it, marketing the firm as trial tested and relentless while pairing two attorneys whose instincts for a case come from genuinely different places.
Recognition Built Over a Career
Gross has been named “Lawyer of the Year” for Litigation, Regulatory Enforcement in Los Angeles by Best Lawyers in America, was named a Top 100 lawyer in California by the Daily Journal, and was recognized as a “Winning Litigator” by the National Law Journal alongside Greenberg. UC Berkeley Law Dean Erwin Chemerinsky has called him “one of the very best trial lawyers in the entire country.” He’s also been selected for inclusion in Best Lawyers in America across multiple practice categories in the years since the firm’s founding, recognition that, unlike an advertising placement, comes from evaluations by other attorneys and judges in the same practice areas rather than from anything the firm submits itself.
Staying Involved in the Legal Community
Gross served as president of the Orange County Bar Association in 2013, the same year he co-founded the firm, and has made mentoring law students and newer attorneys a specific focus of that involvement. That kind of leadership role typically means representing the local legal profession’s interests to the courts and the public, organizing continuing education for practicing attorneys, and, in Gross’s case, spending time specifically on the attorneys who are earliest in their careers. Colleagues have described him as someone who packs a week’s worth of meetings and civic commitments into an average day, a pace that extends past his own casework into shaping the next generation of Orange County’s legal community. For a firm built in part around representing people in disputes with much larger institutions, having a co-founder who spent a presidency focused on mentorship rather than only case volume says something about how the firm has chosen to define success beyond its verdicts, and about where Gross has chosen to put his time now that he no longer has to build his own career from the position he started in.