Daniel Horowitz

Growing up on the streets of New York, Daniel Horowitz says he saw only three paths: the military, trial law or crime. He did not want to hurt people or to be hurt, “So that left: lawyer,” he says. His father was a war hero who sold bags store to store to feed the family. Daniel ran a high-end audio business in college but chose law to defend the people he grew up with, then launched his practice with California’s first controversial yellow pages ad, a dancing cash register.

Daniel says what sets him apart is “what doesn’t set me apart.” After more than 200 jury trials in civil and criminal litigation, he has learned how many great attorneys are out there. Young lawyers, he says, are never going to be the best; the goal is to be one of the group that takes the job seriously and does its very best for each client, trusting the legal system to grind out “some modicum of justice.”

The Ailee Jong case. Ailee was a 2-year-old with liver cancer who needed resection surgery at a top tertiary hospital but was instead treated at a community hospital in Walnut Creek, where the head of perioperative medicine warned she would die if the surgery went ahead. It did, and she died. Daniel’s filing prompted San Francisco Chronicle coverage, and Senator Padilla, Congressmember DeSaulnier, the California Medical Board and Department of Public Health descended on John Muir Health, which restricted its pediatric unit. “You know that you’ve saved lives,” he says.

Daniel’s closing thought is that using the law to do good must be balanced with family obligations and the need to make money. When he decided to become a lawyer, his mother sent him to lunch with his cousin Marty Garbus, a famous First Amendment lawyer, who walked through the 1960s radical icons and revealed who funded each of them. Without financial strength, Daniel says, he could never have carried the John Muir case. “Never be embarrassed to make money, and never be embarrassed to have heart,” he says.

Daniel earned his J.D. from Southwestern University School of Law in 1980 and was admitted to the California State Bar the same year. He founded the Law Office of Daniel Horowitz in 1981. He is a certified criminal law specialist through the State Bar of California’s Board of Legal Specialization, a distinction held by a select group of attorneys, and he belongs to the State Bar of California and The National Trial Lawyers: Top 100. His practice includes personal injury as well as criminal defense.

Daniel is lead counsel at Lawyers in Lafayette in Lafayette, California, online at lawyersinlafayette.com. Over a career spanning more than four decades, he has handled matters ranging from multimillion-dollar civil lawsuits to death penalty murder trials, along with thousands of arbitrations and contested evidentiary hearings. Notable clients include former Ukrainian Prime Minister Pavel Lazarenko, author Terry McMillan and media personality Michael Savage. He is also a legal commentator who has appeared on CNN, MSNBC and Fox News, discussing cases such as the Scott Peterson and Michael Jackson trials.

Daniel’s results include a $2 million victory, upheld by the courts, against a party bus insurer over a sexual assault on the bus, and a police corruption lawsuit against the City of Pittsburg that led to dozens of criminal cases being dismissed. In 2024 he won dismissal of all charges in a major Orange County workers compensation fraud prosecution. In the Lazarenko case, the U.S. District Court threw out every count he worked on. He has been selected to Super Lawyers from 2020 to 2025.