Gary A. Bresee

Gary Bresee is a partner in the firm’s San Francisco office. He has worked on a wide range of business litigation matters for insurance companies, corporations, partnerships and individuals.

Mr. Bresee is a trial attorney with more than 20 years litigation and trial experience in complex business litigation, insurance coverage, complex insurance litigation, bad faith, employment law, attorney fee disputes, appellate practice, and claims under California’s Unfair Business Practices statutes.  He also has experience in disability, life, health and annuity claims, as well as real property transactions and litigation.  Since 1992 he has litigated, consulted and served as an expert in attorneys’ fee disputes and the nature and scope of an insurer’s duty to defend.  The underlying cases have involved construction defect litigation, commercial disputes, personal injury claims arising from clean room litigation, Buss allocations, employment claims, intellectual property and workers’ compensation litigation.  His experience includes jury trials, court trials, mediations and arbitrations.  His appellate experience includes appeals and petitions for review before the California Courts of Appeal and the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.

Mr. Bresee’s representative matters include:

• In a case where the insurance industry avoided a significant tax increase on deductible worker’s compensation policies, Mr. Bresee defended an insurance company against the taxing authority for workers’ compensation premiums for the State of Arizona.  The State alleged that the insurance industry, as a whole, was under-reporting premium taxes on large deductible workers compensation policies sold in the state.  The case was dismissed on the merits in November 2007.
• In several construction defect coverage cases Mr. Bresee successfully defended the insurers from bad faith allegations and claims for punitive damages.
• Mr. Bresee helped obtain a verdict in excess of one million dollars against a law firm after a jury trial concerning the firm’s billing practices.

Significant Cases

Mr. Bresee served as a defense expert in a case which decided the reasonableness of attorney fees, City of Los Angeles v. County of Kern, Case No. CV 06-5094 GAF (VBKx), (September 3, 2008). U.S. District Judge Gary Allen Feess found Mr. Bresee’s testimony highly persuasive and adopted the majority of his recommendations. Click here to read the full decision.