Published in 2024 Mountain States Super Lawyers magazine
By Nancy Henderson on July 3, 2024
Late at night, three weeks into a defamation trial, commercial litigator David Reymann argued a directed verdict motion in a nearly empty Provo courtroom. Such after-hours proceedings were standard, and his law partners were already back at the hotel across the street, preparing witnesses for the next day.
The outcome, too, seemed inevitable. “Dave, just handle this,” his colleagues at Salt Lake City’s Parr Brown Gee & Loveless had urged. “The judge isn’t going to grant it, so when you’re done, just come back to the hotel and let us know.”
“There was a lot of money at stake, and we were basically living down there for a month,” Reymann says. “It was kind of a fun commercial dispute, not super dry.”
It was also the kind of case Reymann relishes, one with a bit of a twist. After convincing the women who stocked a multilevel marketing company’s employee store to donate expired personal care products for him to give to Third World recipients, the suspect had instead sold them on eBay with the help of two accomplices. When Reymann’s client filed a police report, the trio sued for defamation.
When Reymann finished in court that evening and joined the other attorneys, jaws dropped at the news. The judge granted the motion. “We basically won,” he says. “It was a little anticlimactic that way. I don’t think my partners believed me when I first told them what had just happened. But it was a huge victory.” Reymann was, in fact, so persuasive that the judge threw out the plaintiffs’ case, leaving only the company’s counterclaims for the jury, which awarded significant damages.
Commercial litigator Jeff Hunt tried that case and many others with Reymann. “At oral argument, he strips away all the nonsense and gets right to the heart of the issue, which judges really appreciate,” says Hunt.
“His default mode is to be quite direct, which can ruffle feathers. But sometimes feathers need ruffling.”
Despite his Alabama upbringing, Reymann, 50, says with a chuckle, “Whatever the Southern training for euphemisms was supposed to be, I guess I didn’t get that. I try to be honest with clients and not sugarcoat things if the situation is not great, but I’ve never seen the point in beating around the bush. … I don’t think anybody ever wonders what I really think.”
Now in his 25th year with Parr Brown, Reymann spends half his time on First Amendment and media work, the other half on complex business litigation, intellectual property and, occasionally, environmental law. He has represented every media organization in Utah, plus a slew of national ones, including CNN, The Associated Press and Fox Television Stations.
His ability to cut to the chase is a throwback to his debates in high school and college, which, he says, is “outstanding training for litigation, probably better than any single class I took.” Still, Reymann is anything but austere. He laughs a lot, often refers to cases as “fun” and, as much as possible, unplugs from his own competitive thoughts by fly fishing for trout in serene places.
Born in Seattle, Reymann was 3 years old when his family moved to Alabama, where his dad grew up. Reymann’s passion for debating, and a philosophy major that taught him how to dissect and respond to various types of arguments, led him straight to law and, in particular, litigation. “I had no desire to draft documents,” he says. “I was always more interested in the back-and-forth and the advocacy piece of it. Probably my favorite thing to do is to be in court, arguing.”
Upon graduating from law school, he turned down an offer from a big San Francisco firm in favor of Parr Brown. Salt Lake City was just more appealing, he says.
His physician dad had made only one request when his son told him he wanted to practice law: “You can do whatever you want as long as you don’t sue doctors.” Yet that’s exactly what Reymann’s first case entailed.
His client, whose wife died during childbirth, claimed that medical practitioners had failed to remove fluid that accumulated around her heart. “I jumped in with both feet,” Reymann recalls. “It was a great experience getting trial preparation experience that early on. And then basically, on the eve of trial, the hospital found the lost autopsy slides, and they showed that she had died of a pulmonary embolism and not what the plaintiff was claiming. So that case ended up getting dismissed.”
Nevertheless, Reymann says, “It was one of those things where truth ended up mattering more in the end. But it was a good lesson and … sort of threw me in the deep end to help prepare for trial when I didn’t really know what the hell I was doing.” His dad merely rolled his eyes about it.
Reymann got an early introduction to First Amendment issues in a case involving a young man who was being criminally prosecuted for his remarks on a now-defunct social media platform. Reymann’s team submitted an amicus brief to the Utah Supreme Court, and the outdated criminal libel law was struck down. Soon, he was dogging Hunt, the senior partner who’d recruited him and started the firm’s First Amendment and media practice group, to let him handle more of those cases.
“I’ve always been a big believer in the principles that underlie our commitment to free speech,” Reymann says. “I find the constitutional overlay on cases that involve the First Amendment really fascinating.” What’s more, he says, it has allowed him to drop into different areas of law he would ordinarily never be privy to. “I’ve been in juvenile court. I’ve been in divorce proceedings. I’ve been in criminal proceedings—all for these types of access to records—and that keeps it interesting.”
Since joining the firm, Reymann has helped man its Freedom of Information Hotline, which is free to journalists seeking advice about access to government records, open meetings and the interpretation of new laws. He also does a lot of pro bono work for media entities. “They don’t have as much economic security as they used to.” Reymann has successfully represented TV outlets in their fight to use cameras in high-profile criminal trials; pushed to enact Rule 509 of the Utah Rules of Evidence, which greatly reduced the number of subpoenas demanding research materials from news reporters; and has taken several cases all the way to the Utah Supreme Court, resulting in changes to public access laws. In 2015, the Utah Headliners Chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists awarded him its Sunshine Award for his efforts to fight for governmental transparency in Utah.
Some of Reymann’s First Amendment cases, however, don’t involve journalists at all. For a local physics professor whose repeated requests for records “related to what he thought were election shenanigans” were denied by the Utah Attorney General’s Office, Reymann appealed to the state Supreme Court and won a reversal. After a disgruntled Utah Jazz fan allegedly made an offensive statement to visiting basketball player Russell Westbrook, who is Black, Westbrook spoke to the media about the incident. The fan sued Westbrook and the Jazz, Reymann’s client, for defamation for more than $100 million. The case prevailed at the Utah Court of Appeals, and is still ongoing. And when an irate attorney threatened to sue someone who posted a negative Google review, Reymann represented the commenter for free and resolved the issue.
“All lawyers, at least in litigation, are sort of archaeologists that are brought in after the fact, trying to reconstruct what has happened,” Reymann says. “With a normal contract dispute, you have everything spelled out in a document, and the question is: Do people’s actions comply with their obligations? This is very different. This is more sort of looking for the truth of things that may have nothing to do with the law or the subject matter of legal claims.”
Reymann’s pro bono efforts go beyond First Amendment matters. He’s volunteered his time for post-conviction relief proceedings for death row inmates and represented immigrants from the Middle East whose citizenship applications were unlawfully delayed after 9/11. He’s also handled several cases for the Rocky Mountain Innocence Center, including a recent one for a long-haul truck driver accused of sexual abuse of a minor. When the man’s conviction was overturned by the Utah Court of Appeals, Reymann convinced a trial judge to issue an affirmative declaration of innocence, which exonerated the man and allowed for some degree of compensation for his seven years behind bars, though the case is on appeal.
“One of the highest callings an attorney can have is to help the justice system function properly, and when there are mistakes made, to correct them,” Reymann says. “I’ve always felt that we have an obligation, as lawyers, to help people who need help and can’t afford a lawyer of their own.”
Despite the serious, high-stakes nature of Reymann’s cases, now and then a more lighthearted one comes along. When Nightcrawler, a crime thriller starring Jake Gyllenhaal, came out in 2014, a Utah filmmaker sued for copyright infringement. For four years, Reymann and his team defended a handful of movie companies involved in the production, and the case was dismissed a week before trial. “It was a lot of fun because we got sort of this window into some Hollywood stuff,” he says. “There were some famous people involved, and it was like the glitterati, being able to go out and spend some time with people that normally would never be involved in litigation in Utah. Our expert was the guy who wrote Back to the Future, that kind of stuff.”
Though he has a busy schedule, Reymann takes great pains to make time to mentor young lawyers at his firm. “He will sit down with an associate and walk them through his entire redline of their draft brief,” Hunt says. “That takes time, but it pays huge dividends in terms of training and development.”
“It takes commitment,” Reymann says. “I’ve always felt like you’re making an investment that hopefully [causes] the person to stick around long-term. … The hope is that they will make your job easier down the road, but that’s never the case at the start.”
He also shares his craft as an adjunct professor at the University of Utah’s S.J. Quinney College of Law. “We are fundamentally storytellers, and most of persuasive writing is telling a story. When you get a case in, you have to figure out where that narrative is and figure out what the case is about,” he says. “I tell my students, ‘If you can’t explain that to your friend or spouse or whoever, especially a nonlawyer, in a couple minutes, then you haven’t figured out what the case is about.’ It’s a process of just sort of sifting away the chaff from the wheat.”
Championing the First Amendment, no matter the context or details, has become more critical than ever, he insists. “The way that Donald Trump spoke about the news media has had such lasting damage. It’s not just him, but he was certainly a significant part of it, in undermining public confidence in what people have to say, what the news media reports. There’s been a loss of trust, unjustifiably, and it’s been dangerous.
“We just finished a legislative session here,” Reymann adds. “Jeff and I do a lot of lobbying on these issues for legislation, and this was probably the most hostile legislative session toward the news media that I have seen. … People forget that this is one of the only private jobs that’s set out in the Constitution. Journalists serve an incredibly valuable role, no matter what the subject matter is, of being a surrogate for the public to be able to observe what they can’t observe.”
The Religion of Food
For David Reymann, the “real” Southern dishes he ate as a child in Alabama can’t be beat. “There’s a hodgepodge of stuff here, and there are some very good restaurants, but they come from all over the place,” Reymann notes. “There’s not the sort of steeped culture around food that there is in the South, because food in the South is basically a religion for a lot of people—besides religion and football.”
To assuage his hunger for comfort food, he cooks it at home: collard greens, baby back ribs, black-eyed peas and the dish he says he would choose as his last on death row, fried chicken. “I still love Alabama white chicken, even though it sounds gross to people who’ve never had it before,” he says. “Alabama white sauce is mostly mayonnaise, and vinegar with some cayenne and stuff. You brush it on grilled chicken after it comes off the grill, and it’s delicious.”
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