Camille Vasquez wants her corporate clients to know one thing for certain.
“I’m not just a Hollywood lawyer,” Vasquez said. “Let’s start with that. What I’d like them to know is that I care very much about my clients and my cases, and it is a real pleasure of mine to be able to represent clients.”
Vasquez, of course, became internationally famous as one of the key lawyers who helped Johnny Depp successfully sue Amber Heard.
Since that case ended in 2022, Vasquez and her colleagues have moved to Sheppard Mullin Richter & Hampton, where she now represents corporate clients such as PepsiCo, Korean Air and Amazon. Just this month, Vasquez was named managing partner of Sheppard’s Orange County office, effective April 1.
“I really love what I get to do, and it’s such an honor and privilege to be able to represent people and corporations when it’s the most stressful crisis that they have faced,” Vasquez said during an interview on the 10th floor of her Costa Mesa office that overlooks the Segerstrom Center for the Arts.
Sheppard ranks No. 3 on the Business Journal’s annual list of legal firms, with 102 lawyers.
Camille at the Plaza
Vasquez’s mother, Marilia, came to the United States as a political refugee from Cuba, while her father, Leonel, a native of Colombia, arrived on a student visa in the late 1960s.
Vasquez and her sister, Shari Directo, were raised in Buena Park but often spent a week or two every month at the Anaheim Hilton Hotel Towers, where her father, the resident manager, was required to be available 24 hours a day.
“My sister and I grew up, actually, at the Anaheim Hilton Towers,” she recalled.
“It was like the ‘Eloise at the Plaza’ book. Every morning, my sister and I would be in our uniforms heading down the elevator to go to school, and tourists would say, ‘Are you girls off to Disneyland?’ Every morning, it was the same song and dance.”
She knew she would become a lawyer.
“I was a mouthy child,” she said. “I had no fear of talking back ever since I was really young.
“My parents are immigrants to this country, and education to them was the most important thing. And they told my sister and me to become either a doctor or a lawyer. And so they now have one of each. My sister’s a pediatrician in Los Angeles.”
Vasquez attended the University of Southern California and then Southwestern Law School, which had “a nice entertainment practice” that attracted her. While at the law school, she interned for the famous attorney Robert Shapiro on the last murder case that he ever worked on.
After graduating, her first job in 2010 was at the Costa Mesa office of Lewis Brisbois, which, coincidentally, is in the same building where Sheppard is now located.
“I started doing insurance defense work. Not sexy, not entertainment, not drug sex and rock and roll as people say in the industry,” Vasquez said.
Her first trial involved the notorious practice of “slip and fall” where she represented the defendant.
“I lost my first trial,” she recalled. “I learned a lot more from that loss than I did from any wins. The big takeaway for me personally was that the jury’s always watching and that it very much is a popularity contest.
“Being able to read the room and being able to have some type of connection with the jury and build that rapport and trust with them is actually more important in my view than sometimes even the facts.”
She then worked for more than six years at Brown Rudnick LLP, which she said passed her over for promotion to partner for two straight years.
“It took the Johnny Depp trial for them to call me and say, ‘you’ve been promoted’,” Vasquez said. “And obviously I was very grateful.”
In 2024, she, along with Ben Chew and her group of about 10 attorneys, moved to Sheppard Mullin.
“We definitely felt like we wanted to try to make it work at Brown Rudnick, but, ultimately, I think we outgrew the platform. Sheppard Mullin is a much larger firm. They have offices all over the world. As a result of that, we’ve been able to expand our practice into other areas that, and service our clients with our partners here that we weren’t able to do at Brown.”
Brand Reputation Management
Nowadays, she is a commercial litigator handling business issues, such as a group of business owners involved in nursing homes who had a dispute with their own family members, and well-known Texas attorney Tony Buzbee, who is being sued by the famous rapper and Beyoncé’s husband, Jay-Z.
On the day of the interview with the Business Journal, Vasquez was dealing with “a very serious death threat” against the chief executive of one of her clients.
As a co-lead of Sheppard’s brand and reputation management practice, she advises executives on media strategies to protect their reputation during high-pressure periods.
“You have a lot of people who like to think of themselves as journalists, and they take a lot of liberties online, and they don’t realize the effect that their words have on people, not just their financial ramifications, but also defamation.
“I tell clients all the time that we can’t play whack-a-mole because you’re never going to win. You can’t just be attacking every single bot that comes on the internet and then defames you. That’s not effective. Don’t give them the attention that they so desperately are seeking.
“However, you have to balance that with when you actually have a real attack on your brand or reputation, or if something is said that is so wrong, so false, that you have to correct the record, that it’s existential to your name, to your brand, to your safety.
“Once an accusation kind of takes on a life of its own, it’s very difficult to quash it.
“I often tell clients that at the end of the day, we’re all human beings,” she said. “We just want to feel like we’re heard or that we can vent. And if you can figure out in a case what’s important to the other side, you usually find a solution.”
After Depp’s famous trial, Vasquez worked as a television analyst for NBC for a year.
“I realized that being a TV lawyer wasn’t really for me,” Vasquez said. “I like being a real lawyer now, not just playing one on TV.”
Camille Vasquez on Winning the Amber Heard v. Johnny Depp Trial
At the height of the MeToo movement, Amber Heard in 2018 penned an opinion piece in the Washington Post where she alleged that she, too, was a victim of abuse.
While Heard didn’t name her former husband, Johnny Depp, the article implicated the famous movie star.
When Depp asked Camille Vasquez, who had represented him in other legal matters, to pursue a libel lawsuit, she advised him to drop the matter.
“But this was something that was bothering him, the accusations that he had been abusive towards his ex-wife,” Vasquez said. “He asked me a question that I’ll never forget, which is,
‘Have you ever been accused of something that you didn’t do?’ And I thought about that, and I had to answer honestly, no. And he said, ‘Talk to me once you have.’
“He wanted his reputation back.”
The accusations caused the Walt Disney Co. to drop Depp from the profitable “Pirates of the Caribbean” franchise. Depp sued Heard for $50 million.
“It’s obviously a symbolic number, but it was tethered to some reality by losing, not just Pirates Six, but the subsequent Pirate movies that they could make along with backend participation, which obviously he would’ve been entitled to as the lead actor.”
Heard countersued for $100 million, alleging Depp and his representatives orchestrated a smear campaign against her. While Depp and Heard were married for only 16 months, the op-ed caused six years of litigation and controversy.
The televised trial in Virginia became a massive media spectacle, featuring extensive testimony from both parties, witnesses, audio recordings, photos of injuries, text messages, and allegations of mutual abuse, substance issues, and toxic behavior.
While the media clamored for tidbits, visitors slept overnight to get tickets to the courtroom.
“It was a very organized circus,” Vasquez quipped. “After the first few days of the trial, we all forgot about the cameras.
“This work was so overwhelming. We had no rest for six weeks, just nonstop. We lived, breathed, ate this case. This trial was existential for Johnny. And we all took it very personally. We cared about him. We wanted to vindicate him. We wanted to make sure that he had his day in court.”
She said the case captured the attention of many people for various reasons.
“It was one of the first MeToo cases that actually went to trial, was televised, talking about two celebrities. We were talking about a lot of money.”
A key part of the trial was about 50 hours of conversations that Depp and Heard recorded with each other.
“Some marital relationship therapist told these two knuckleheads that it would be a good idea to record each other,” Vasquez said. “They would record each other arguing. As a result of this, we had a treasure trove of evidence.
“What was so key about that evidence was that we had them in their own words, describing the very arguments or fights that she later claimed were physical and that he had become physical with her.
“There is no mention of physical violence except on his part saying that she started the physical fights. And then we had one that we played a lot for the jury with her mocking him, saying, ‘Tell them. Tell the jury. Tell the judge you, Johnny Depp, a man, are a victim of domestic abuse.’”
Depp testified over several days, denying abuse and presenting evidence that showed Heard was the aggressor.
“The reason that we won really comes down to one thing — Johnny. Anyone who watched saw who he really is as a man, as a father, as an actor, as a philanthropist.
“And that was a promise that I made to the jury in the opening statement. I said to them, by the end of this trial, you’re going to know who the real Johnny Depp is, win or lose.
He needed to be able to get out his story. He needed to be able to say to any person that’s ever watched him on a TV show or on in a film, ‘I did not do this.’”
At closing, Depp’s lawyers homed in on Heard’s First Amendment rights. Winning a libel suit was difficult because the standards are higher when the plaintiff is a celebrity like Depp.
“She had the right to write this op-ed, to publish it. She had the right to express her experience, but she didn’t have the right to defame someone,” Vasquez said.
“To be defamed publicly lives forever unless you take a stand and say, ‘This isn’t true and I’m going to fight to make sure that everyone who reads this knows that this isn’t true.’”
The jury awarded Depp $12 million. Both sides appealed. Heard settled by paying $1 million to Depp, who donated the money to charities, mostly involving children.
About the “Pirates of the Caribbean” — will Depp be able to return as Jack Sparrow?
“We hope so,” Vasquez said. “Stay tuned.”
