David Fang-Yen Jeopardy Profile: Age, Job, Family, Stats

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David Fang-Yen Jeopardy Contestant Profile

David Fang-Yen is a Portland, Oregon attorney and senior legislative lawyer who appears on Jeopardy! as a contestant identified simply as an Attorney. His legal career combines private-sector litigation experience with more than a decade of public-service work in Oregon state government, where he has become a Senior Deputy Legislative Counsel for the Oregon Legislature.

Fang-Yen earned his undergraduate degree from the University of Chicago in 2004 before attending Stanford Law School, where he received his Juris Doctor in 2009. That educational path placed him at two of the country’s most selective universities and prepared him for a legal career spanning major-firm litigation and legislative drafting.

After law school, Fang-Yen was admitted to practice law in Illinois in 2009. He joined the Chicago office of Mayer Brown LLP, an international law firm, where he worked in the firm’s litigation and dispute-resolution practice. His work there focused particularly on consumer finance litigation and class-action defense.

His time at Mayer Brown gave him experience handling sophisticated commercial disputes and representing major clients in complex litigation. Consumer-finance and class-action matters often involve overlapping questions of banking regulation, statutory interpretation, contractual rights and large-scale civil claims, providing Fang-Yen with a strong background in financial and regulatory law.

Fang-Yen subsequently moved to Oregon and joined the Office of the Legislative Counsel in approximately 2014–2015. The Legislative Counsel office is the nonpartisan legal arm of the Oregon Legislature responsible for drafting bills, amendments and other legislative documents and providing legal advice to legislators and legislative committees.

When Fang-Yen joined the office, his initial subject-matter focus included public contracting. Over time, his portfolio expanded considerably, and he advanced from Deputy Legislative Counsel to Senior Deputy Legislative Counsel.

As a Senior Deputy Legislative Counsel, Fang-Yen now handles some of the most financially significant and technically complex areas of Oregon law. His assigned subject areas include appropriations, auditing, banks and financial institutions, bonds and bonding, budgets, the Emergency Board, emergency services, gambling, horse racing, legislative contract review, the Oregon Lottery, ports, securities, state finance, state officers and salaries, the State Treasurer and unclaimed property.

His responsibilities mean that he works directly on the legal language behind Oregon legislation involving state finances and governmental operations. He drafts proposed laws and amendments, evaluates existing statutes and advises legislators about how legislative proposals interact with Oregon law.

Fang-Yen’s work can involve highly specific questions of statutory interpretation. For example, he has prepared formal legislative-counsel memoranda analyzing whether proposed legislation would have a practical legal effect when existing Oregon statutes already regulate the same activity. This illustrates the analytical side of legislative counsel work, where attorneys must not only draft language but also identify conflicts, redundancies and unintended consequences.

He is particularly closely involved with state budgeting and appropriations, areas central to the functioning of Oregon government. He also works on legislation concerning financial institutions, securities, state bonds and the Oregon Treasury, drawing naturally on his earlier experience in consumer-finance litigation.

Another significant part of his portfolio is gambling and lottery law. Fang-Yen serves as a legislative-counsel resource on matters involving the Oregon Lottery, horse racing and other regulated gambling activities, requiring familiarity with both detailed statutory frameworks and state financial policy.

His responsibilities extend into emergency management and emergency services as well. Oregon legislative training materials identify Fang-Yen as one of the Legislative Counsel contacts for lawmakers working on emergency-management legislation.

Fang-Yen also shares responsibility for Legislative Contract Review, reflecting his longstanding experience with public contracting. This work concerns the legal framework governing how state agencies and other public bodies enter into contracts and procure goods and services.

His career therefore represents a substantial shift from private litigation to public-law work. Rather than representing individual clients in court, Fang-Yen now spends much of his professional life helping shape the precise legal language that eventually becomes part of Oregon statutory law.

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David Fang-Yen Jeopardy Results