Faculty Profile

Adam Merrill is admitted in Illinois and Utah and has expertise in complex commercial litigation and appeals, election litigation, and federal criminal defense. He has first-chaired bench and jury trials in the Northern District of Illinois, the Circuit Court of Cook County, Illinois, and the Illinois State Board of Elections, and he has argued appeals in the Illinois Appellate Court, New York Supreme Court, Appellate Division, Florida District Court of Appeal, and the US Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit.

Mr. Merrill’s experience includes accountant and legal malpractice (including tax shelters), Delaware corporate governance, antitrust, election law, bankruptcy and insolvency, and defense of federal prosecutions. He has represented clients under investigation by the US Department of Justice and various federal agencies and clients investigated by and summoned before federal grand juries. Mr. Merrill was an associate and partner at Kirkland & Ellis LLP (1995–2003), a partner at Sperling & Slater, LLC (2003–2020), and is the founding partner of Watershed Law LLC (2020–present). For many years, he was a panel attorney with the Federal Defender Program in Chicago, and he is regularly appointed by the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals to represent indigent defendants. 

Mr. Merrill is an adjunct professor (Civil Procedure and Evidence) at Brigham Young University’s J. Reuben Clark Law School and is a member of the Utah Supreme Court’s Advisory Committee on the Rules of Evidence. Mr. Merrill studied accounting at Brigham Young University and graduated cum laude from the J. Reuben Clark Law School in 1995, where he was a member of the Law Review and the National Trial Advocacy Team.