Jim Barrall is a Senior Fellow in Residence at the Lowell Milken Institute for Business Law and Policy, where he leads the Institute’s Tax and Business Law Scholarship Program.

Prior to joining the Institute in January 2017, Barrall was a partner of Latham & Watkins LLP for 30 years where he chaired the firm’s executive compensation and benefits practice and Los Angeles Tax Department. Before joining Latham, Barrall was an associate and then a partner of Ervin, Cohen and Jessup. At Latham and ECJ Barrall represented companies, Boards of Directors, Compensation Committees and executives on executive compensation and benefit matters in myriad contexts.

Barrall is a nationally recognized expert and frequent author, contributing editor and lecturer on executive compensation, corporate governance, tax, disclosure and other regulatory matters. Barrall is a co-author of the chapter on extensions of credit to directors and officers in the American Bar Association’s “Practitioner’s Guide to the Sarbanes-Oxley Act” and 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. From 2010 until he retired from Latham, Chambers U.S.A. listed Barrall in Band 1 nationwide and as its sole “star” California lawyer in its Employee Benefits and Executive Compensation rankings.

Barrall is a member of the Advisory Boards of the UCLA School of Law and the Lowell Milken Institute, and is an advisor to the Boards 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 Los Angeles Jazz Society. He is also the Founding Chair of the Law School’s Law Firm Challenge, which he founded in 2002.

Barrall 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 Barrall was named the Alumni of the Year for Professional Achievement by the UCLA School of Law and 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."