Titan of the Plaintiffs Bar: Robbins Geller’s David Knotts

By Sydney Price
Law360
Article is reprinted with permission from Law360.

Law360 (June 4, 2026, 4:04 PM EDT) -- Right after graduating from Cornell University Law School, David Knotts, a native of Kansas City, Missouri, landed at one of the world’s largest corporate defense firms.

During his time as a corporate defense attorney, however, he found his interests lay on the other side, with individuals who had been financially harmed.

“I did not come from a family of attorneys by any means, but a hardworking family that took pride in Midwestern values,” Knotts said. “I went to law school because I wanted to be a litigator.”

“I felt that the corporate defense was attempting to keep wrongs unaddressed, and I didn’t really find that overly appealing,” he added.

Since that revelation, Knotts has spent 16 years at Robbins Geller Rudman & Dowd LLP and has become a trusted litigator in the securities industry. In the past two and a half years alone, he has helped win more than $400 million for plaintiff investors and companies, according to the firm, earning him recognition as one of Law360’s 2026 Titans of the Plaintiffs Bar.

Knott’s recent work includes leading the litigation team that achieved a $192.5 million settlement from Walgreens in 2023. The deal is the largest securities recovery ever paid by a company and its executives, who were found to have issued misleading public statements that impacted a different public company’s stock price, and is the second-largest securities recovery in any Pennsylvania federal court, according to Robbins Geller.

The suit alleged Walgreens and its executives, despite their positive representations in 2016 and 2017, knew that the Federal Trade Commission was skeptical of the company’s planned merger with Rite Aid.

Knotts said the case “was built from the ground up.” As discovery unfolded, thousands of heavily redacted documents produced by Walgreens proved to be a major obstacle for the plaintiffs, he said.

“It’s hard to tell a persuasive story to a jury at trial with largely blacked-out documents,” Knotts said.

Rather than challenge the redactions document by document, Knotts and his team asked the court to take a categorical approach. Opposing counsel called the request “lawless,” according to Knotts, but the court ultimately sided with the plaintiffs and found Walgreens had waived privilege protections over parts of the FTC review process.

That ruling became a turning point in the litigation.

“It led to a ton of just damning evidence for the other side,” Knotts said.

According to Rick Atwood, Knotts’ former colleague at Robbins Geller who is now retired, Knotts’ work in the matter showed what separates him from other attorneys in the field. The pair worked together to litigate the Walgreens case and others.

“He overcame both the attorney-client privilege and the attorney work product protections in the process — something I have rarely seen in over three decades of legal practice,” Atwood said.

He added: “David is quite simply the hardest-working attorney I know. He dives more deeply into the facts and law of his cases than anyone I have had the pleasure of working with.”

In addition to practicing law as a litigator, Knotts also spent years teaching merger and acquisition litigation at University of California, Berkeley School of Law. He and a colleague routinely flew from San Diego to Oakland once a week to teach the course over several semesters.

Knotts said the experience forced him to think deeper about why corporate law has developed the way it has.

“When you articulate very difficult and complex issues to students, it makes articulating many of those same issues to a judge in court just a little bit easier,” Knotts said.

Knotts remains particularly interested in how evolving Delaware corporate law, including recent amendments affecting fiduciary duty litigation, will shape future shareholder disputes.

Knotts credits much of his success to the professionals around him, including associates, staff attorneys and support personnel who help prepare sprawling merger cases for depositions, hearings and trial.

“When we go into depositions or hearings or trials, we’re as prepared as we possibly can be,” Knotts said. “We know the facts better than the other side and probably better than the witness who was actually on the scene when it all went down.”

Knotts said one of the most rewarding aspects of the practice is the ability to carefully choose cases based on evidence of genuine misconduct.

“We look for significant red flags and indications of misconduct,” Knotts said. “It’s important to do as much investigation as we possibly can before bringing a claim so we can satisfy ourselves that there’s true corporate wrongdoing that needs to be addressed.”

--Editing by Amy French.

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