Contact
drice@hosielaw.com

Recognition and Affiliations 

Named Northern California Super Lawyer®, 2019-2024
Selected as one of America’s Top 100 High Stakes Litigators®
“AV Preeminent” Rating, Martindale-Hubbell Peer Review & Judicial Edition Review for 25 years
Named America’s Most Honored Lawyers
Named Lawyers of Distinction
Named Top Women Attorneys in California
White Scholar of the White Center for Law & Public Policy
Member, Notre Dame Law School Advisory Council
Member, Board of Directors, Human Rights Watch, S.F. Committee
President, Barristers Club of San Francisco
Member, Belvedere Community Foundation

 

Bar Admissions

State of California
State of Connecticut
State of Florida

 

Education

Notre Dame Law School, J.D., with Honors
University of Notre Dame, B.A., with Honors

Diane S. Rice

Diane Rice is a trial lawyer who has had more than 35 years of complex litigation experience trying cases throughout the United States. Her practice focuses on difficult and high-profile lawsuits, including commercial disputes (breach of contract, trade secret and misrepresentation), intellectual property, antitrust cases, products liability, mass torts and class action suits. The skill and insight that she brings to cases is based on her broad experience representing plaintiffs and defendants, individuals and Fortune 500 corporations, as well as startup/emerging tech companies and mature companies. Diane’s clients include technology companies, cryptocurrency entities, manufacturers, pharmaceutical and medical device corporations. She and her Hosie Rice partners have litigated cases against Google, eBay, Meta, Yahoo!, Amazon, Cisco, and Mastercard.

In 1985, Diane joined the San Francisco law firm of Brobeck, Phleger & Harrison, where she was a partner from 1991 to 2003. Starting in 2001, she led Brobeck’s Products Liability & Life Sciences Group. Upon the dissolution of Brobeck, Phleger & Harrison, she joined Hosie Rice LLP. Her court experience includes over one hundred weeks of jury trials in 15 states and she has settled thousands of cases.

Diane has been a member of the national trial team for Baxter Healthcare Corporation and Mentor Corporation. She oversaw a pharmaceutical and device litigation for Novartis and Ciba-Geigy Corporations. She managed a national experts’ team for American Home Products. For fifteen years, she represented Fibreboard Corporation, Owens Corning Fiberglas, and Pittsburgh Corning Corporation and litigated on their behalf two of the largest class action trials in the country. Diane was a co-lead class action counsel in the In Re Literary Works in Electronic Databases Copyright Litigation, representing freelance authors who had their works published on Internet databases and publications without their permission.

Diane has also litigated several significant pro bono cases. She represented a child who was severely brain damaged as a result of strangulation in a crib and received a $38 million structured settlement during trial. In another pro bono matter, she obtained a significant multimillion dollar cash settlement on behalf of a star athlete teenage boy who suffered permanent brain damage from a tennis racket blow to the head. For her pro bono service, she received one of Brobeck’s highest recognitions, “The Whit Bridge Community Services Award.”

Diane has been a faculty member for trial advocacy programs at Stanford, Harvard, Notre Dame and the University of San Francisco law schools, as well as a speaker for California Continuing Education of the Bar courses in Trial Skills, Deposition Skills, and Trial Advocacy. She serves as a visiting faculty member of the National Institute of Trial Advocacy. She is often a featured speaker at industry conferences such as Mealey's and the Defense Research Institute Conference.