Thomas r. lee
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Thomas R. Lee has been a trial and appellate attorney in both private and public practice, a distinguished academic, and a justice on the Utah Supreme Court. Immediately before founding Lee Nielsen, Tom served 12 years on the Utah Supreme Court, retiring as the Associate Chief Justice in 2022. During his time on the bench, he was a distinguished lecturer at Brigham Young University, Harvard, and the University of Chicago.
John J. Nielsen is one of the most experienced appellate attorneys in Utah, having litigated over 100 appeals and argued more than 70. Prior to joining Lee Nielsen, John served 11 years as an Assistant Solicitor General for the State of Utah, representing Utah in criminal cases in the state trial and appellate courts. He also litigated in federal court, defending convictions in habeas corpus proceedings.
John J. Nielsen
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Before his time as a justice, he served as associate dean and held the Rex and Maureen Rawlinson chair at Brigham Young University's J. Reuben Clark Law School, where he taught courses on civil procedure, legislation, intellectual property, and United States Supreme Court practice. During his time as a professor, he also litigated intellectual property cases (representing clients such as Ford Motor Co. and General Motors) and curated an appellate practice, which included arguing in numerous federal courts across the country, including the United States Supreme Court. He has served for many years on the advisory committee for the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure. He took a leave of absence from teaching to serve as Deputy Assistant Attorney General in the Civil Division of the United States Justice Department. Before entering the academy, Tom was a shareholder at a large Salt Lake law firm. He is a graduate of BYU (economics, summa cum laude) and the University of Chicago (JD, magna cum laude). After law school, he served as a law clerk for Judge Harvie Wilkinson, III, on the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit and then for Justice Clarence Thomas on the United States Supreme Court.
Tom is also a pioneer in law and linguistics, having issued the first American judicial opinion to apply corpus linguistics to statutory analysis. He has written pathbreaking academic articles on law and linguistics that were published in the Yale Law Journal and University of Chicago Law Review and have been cited in dozens of state and federal courts across the country, including the United States Supreme Court. He founded a consulting firm, Corpus Juris Advisors, after his retirement from the bench, which aids lawyers and judges in understanding and applying linguistic methods to briefs and opinions.
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Eric B. Vogeler
Of COUNSEL
Eric brings depth and diversity of practice to each of his cases. A longtime civil litigator and regulatory specialist, Eric has experience representing and advising clients at all stages of business and partnership lifecycles—from inception through growth, acquisition, and winddown—as well as the broad spectrum of issues and disputes they invariably face. In that vein, Eric has been named as one of Utah’s Legal Elite by Utah Business Magazine in Business & Corporate Law (2022), Civil Litigation (2021, 2019, 2018), and In-House Counsel (2020). In his largest practice—civil litigation—Eric serves as lead counsel in cases before the state and federal courts of Utah, both trial and appellate.
Before joining Lee | Nielsen as Of Counsel, Eric established his own practice at Vogeler, PLLC, where he has represented large corporations in multi-jurisdictional litigation as well as individuals and entities in appeals before the Utah appellate courts and the Federal Tenth Circuit Court. Eric has also served as a Senior Vice President of Legal and Regulatory at tZero (an Overstock.com subsidiary), as a litigation partner at Bennett Tueller Johnson & Deere in Salt Lake City, and as a law clerk to Justice Thomas Rex Lee of the Utah Supreme Court. Eric holds degrees from the University of Utah (BA) and Brigham Young University (JD). He currently serves as co-director of the BYU legal design lab, LawX, and volunteers his time judging trial and appellate moot court competitions. Eric is also a frequent presenter on regulatory issues in highly regulated spaces, including banking, finance, and digital assets.
During his time as an Assistant Solicitor General, he also served as a Supreme Court Fellow for the National Association of Attorneys General in Washington, D.C. and authored or co-authored six state amicus briefs in the United States Supreme Court. He serves on the Utah Supreme Court advisory committee for the Rules of Evidence and currently chairs the Appellate Representation Committee. Before becoming an appellate attorney, John was a Deputy Utah County Attorney, where he prosecuted criminal cases in state trial courts for four years. John holds undergraduate (political science, magna cum laude) and JD (magna cum laude) degrees from Brigham Young University. In addition to his legal practice, John teaches appellate practice and writing at both the J. Reuben Clark Law School at BYU and the S.J. Quinney Law School at the University of Utah. He is an active poster on the Appellate Advocacy Blog. And he was named as one of Utah's Legal Elite in 2022 by Utah Business Magazine.