James D. C. Barrall

Jim Barrall is a senior fellow at The Conference Board ESG Center and a visiting scholar and senior fellow in residence at the Lowell Milken Institute for Business Law and Policy at the UCLA School of Law.  He is also a retired partner at Latham & Watkins, where he has served as global Co-Chair of the firm’s benefits, employment and compensation practice.  His work at UCLA Law and his legal practice at Latham focusses on executive compensation and related corporate governance, regulatory and disclosure matters.

Jim is a nationally recognized expert on executive compensation and has been interviewed and quoted by The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Bloomberg BNA, Agenda, Corporate Secretary and other publications.  Since 2010, Chambers U.S.A. has listed him in Band 1 nationwide and as its sole “star” California lawyer in its annual Employee Benefits and Executive Compensation rankings.

Jim is a frequent author, contributing editor and lecturer on executive compensation, corporate governance, disclosure and other regulatory matters.  He is a co-author of the chapter on loans and extensions of credit to directors and officers in the American Bar Association’s “Practitioner’s Guide to the Sarbanes-Oxley Act.”  He has lectured at the UCLA School of Law, the UCLA Anderson School of Management, the Aresty Institute of Executive Education at the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, and Stanford’s Rock Center for Corporate Governance.

Jim is a member of the Advisory Boards of the UCLA School of Law and of the Lowell Milken Institute, and is a member of the Board of the Inner City Law Center, a non-profit provider of legal and other services to veterans, the homeless and the underserved in Los Angeles, and of the Friends of Jazz at UCLA, which supports UCLA’s jazz studies program and its community outreach efforts.

Jim graduated from the University of California at Davis in 1972, with a B.A. degree in Philosophy, and earned his J.D. degree from the UCLA School of Law in 1975, where he served on the UCLA Law Review.  

In 2008, he was named the Alumni of the Year for Professional Achievement by the UCLA School of Law. In 2016, he was awarded the Distinguished Achievement Award by the University of California Davis Alumni Association. The Los Angeles County Bar Association awarded him the 2018 Dana Latham Award, as “a then-living leader of the Los Angeles tax bar who has made an outstanding contribution to the community and to the legal profession in the field of taxation."