Precedent-Setting Litigation Work

The Firm’s litigators work on a wide range of challenging assignments, spanning our global practice and assisting our clients in the successful resolution of a number of important and precedent-setting matters. The Firm has been instrumental in obtaining a number of regulatory rulings supporting the financial industry’s efforts to obtain liquidity in the wake of the subprime crisis and to provide liquidity to its customers efficiently.

Recent highlights in a variety of practice areas include:

• Battling for seven years on behalf of Barclays before successfully defeating the Enron securities class action in which plaintiffs sought damages of $40 billion (other financial institution defendants had settled these claims, agreeing to pay a total of $6.6 billion to plaintiffs in 2005)
  
• Acting as liaison counsel for 55 underwriting firms and securing a favorable settlement – which is currently pending – in litigation arising from IPOs related to the 1998-2000 “tech bubble”
• Representing Moody’s Corporation in several matters that relate to the ratings of mortgage-backed securities and also advising Moody’s Investors Service in an industry-wide investigation into practices for rating subprime instruments
  
• Advising UBS in significant pending matters involving subprime securities and HealthSouth Corporation
  
• Successfully arguing to the Delaware Supreme Court on behalf of CA that a proposed shareholder bylaw requiring the mandatory reimbursement of proxy solicitation expenses of short slate candidates was invalid, thus establishing important guidelines on the permissible scope of shareholder bylaw proposals
  
• Achieving two arbitration victories on behalf of TeliaSonera before two separate Tribunals of the International Chamber of Commerce

In addition, we were recently selected as lead litigation counsel for 20 major financial institutions as plaintiffs in a complex action against monocline insurer MBIA; the financial institutions are all policyholders in MBIA seeking to reverse a restructuring that MBIA had engineered in 2009.