Partner, Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher, LLP
As a young girl, Debra Wong Yang often walked through Chinatown with her maternal grandfather, Geui Hong (Daniel Hall) Quan. A founding father of L.A.’s Chinatown, he pointed out neighbors who couldn’t speak English, couldn’t navigate a system that wasn’t built for them. “You are going to be in a place where you can help others when they can’t help themselves,” he told her. And she never forgot it.
That obligation, passed down through four generations of Chinese Americans, became the engine of one of the country’s most distinguished legal careers. Yang is a partner and crisis management practice chair at Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher, a former California state judge, and a former U.S. Attorney — the first Asian American woman to serve in that federal role, appointed by President George W. Bush in 2002.
A self-described “sampler” who graduated from Pitzer College uncertain of her direction, Yang eventually landed at Boston College Law School. After early years in private practice in Santa Monica and Chicago, where she helped found what would become the National Asian Pacific American Bar Association (NAPABA), Yang left for a clerkship with California federal court judge Ronald S. W. Lew, the first Chinese American to be appointed to the bench. His commitment to the Asian American community deepened her own. She later played a founding role in the Chinese American Museum in Los Angeles.
Yang then joined the U.S. Attorney’s office in Los Angeles, drawn by its promise of trial experience and purpose. Over seven years as an assistant U.S. attorney, she took on high-profile cases, including the state’s first federal carjacking prosecution and one of the country’s first computer hacking convictions, before ascending to the bench. At 37, she was the youngest supervising judge at the Los Angeles Superior Courts.
Her appointment as U.S. Attorney in 2002 came during the seismic aftermath of September 11, when law enforcement was being rebuilt from the ground up. Yang flew to Washington every other week for terrorism briefings, ran the largest U.S. Attorney’s office outside D.C., and prosecuted more corporate fraud cases than the New York district in her first year — including a landmark $771 million settlement against the French bank Crédit Lyonnais. “When things were hitting the fan,” she has said, “I go to a place of clarity.”
She brought that clarity to Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher, which she joined in 2006, turning down an offer to become the first Asian American woman on the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. She chose Big Law partly for financial stability as a single mother of three, and partly for a different kind of mission: to create space for women and people of color in rooms where she rarely saw them. She has served on the firm’s Executive Committee for over a decade. In 2022, she received the American Jewish Committee’s prestigious Learned Hand Award for her work on civil rights and combating anti-Asian hatred.
For Yang, Committee of 100 is a natural extension of what her grandfather asked of her on those Chinatown walks decades ago. “When it’s all said and done,” she told Lawdragon, “I don’t care a whit about accolades for myself. They were just a vehicle to give me the ability to speak for other people.”
