Robert Clifford is celebrating his 50th reunion this month with College of Law classmates. He is a DePaul Life Trustee, prominent Chicago trial lawyer, and founder and senior partner of Clifford Law Offices PC, a premier Chicago law firm specializing in personal injury and wrongful death litigation.

“This extraordinary gift honors Bob’s distinguished career while shaping the future of legal education at DePaul for generations to come,” said DePaul President Robert L. Manuel. “It builds on the College of Law’s proud history and strengthens its position as a leader in preparing exceptional lawyers who lead with integrity, serve their communities and advance justice. I am deeply grateful to Bob and Joan for their remarkable generosity, their longstanding partnership and their unwavering belief in DePaul’s Catholic and Vincentian mission.”

The couple’s gift provides critical resources to support students, faculty and the larger legal community in Chicago through continuing education and professional development. The gift will endow new scholarships, faculty fellowships, a new center and more.

“I am a proud alumnus of the law school and felt this was a way to give back to an institution that has given me so much,” Clifford said.  “As an undergraduate, it is where I met my wife of 53 years, Joan, and we have maintained our ties and support over the years.  Our hope is that this gift will offer more opportunities to the students of the future and continues the tradition of legal excellence for generations of lawyers to come.”

It establishes the Robert A. Clifford Trial Advocacy, Litigation, and Negotiation Center, which will elevate DePaul’s current offerings in this field. The new center will build on DePaul’s strong history of educating some of the nation’s leading trial attorneys and judges. It will support integrated, skills-oriented training and generate recognition through national mock trial and negotiation competitions. It also provides an entry point for alumni to support and mentor students in critical advocacy skills.

Additionally, the gift creates the Robert A. Clifford College of Law Endowment, which establishes Clifford Excellence Scholarships and Clifford Distinguished Faculty Fellows programs and ensures support for the esteemed Clifford Symposium on Tort Law & Social Policy. It also provides support for the college’s highest priority needs, such as technology upgrades, seed funds for new programs, and high-visibility engagement opportunities for faculty and students.

The Clifford Excellence Scholarships program will recognize high-achieving law students navigating the complex challenges of the legal profession. Grounded in Vincentian values of integrity, compassion, service and ethics, it will provide financial support to students who exemplify these qualities.

The Clifford Distinguished Faculty Fellows program will enable faculty engagement with important scholarly questions and the legal community. Participants in the three-year program will receive research and scholarship support and host a mini symposium on their work to engage the academic and legal communities.

“Joan and I are proud to further the excellence and mission of the College of Law,” Robert Clifford said. “My own DePaul education, informed by DePaul’s Vincentian values that honor the dignity of every person, played a foundational role in my own career journey and perspective. We’re honored to give back and help current and future generations of law students and legal professionals succeed while making a difference in the civil justice system.”

More broadly, the gift also accelerates the momentum of DePaul’s comprehensive Mission: Forward philanthropic campaign, which seeks to raise $650 million benefiting academic innovation, interdisciplinary collaboration and purpose-driven education across the university.

“Such transformative commitments have a ripple effect, motivating others to give back during this pivotal moment in DePaul’s history,” said Katie Fraumann, senior vice president of the Division of Advancement and External Relations. “Bob and Joan are inspiring role models setting us on a path to return higher education to its critical purpose as a driver of change addressing society’s greatest challenges.”

The Cliffords’ longstanding support of legal education and scholarship at DePaul includes the Clifford Symposium on Tort Law & Social Policy, which has brought leading legal scholars and practitioners together for more than three decades.

Inaugurated in 1995, the symposium followed the establishment three years earlier of the Robert A. Clifford Chair for Tort Law & Social Policy, the college’s first endowed chair, which supports rigorous academic exploration of the civil justice system and promotes dialogue among scholars, judges and practitioners.

The annual symposium addresses timely and pressing issues in tort law, civil justice and related fields and brings together the nation’s leading legal minds to present groundbreaking research and foster critical discussion informing scholarship and practice.

Complementing the Symposium, the Clifford Scholar-in-Residence Program, now in its sixth year, annually recognizes a talented rising star in the field of civil justice who visits the law school to hold a workshop and deliver a public address offering fresh insights along with contributions from a senior legal commentator for a robust debate on issues impacting consumers.

These established programs, strengthened by the new programs and resources provided through the Cliffords’ gift, reflect and honor a commitment to fostering dialogue on civil justice issues that affect all Americans.

“This extraordinary investment will help define the future of legal education at DePaul,” said Geoffrey Rapp, Dean of the College of Law. “By combining the strength of Chicago’s legal community with rigorous academics and hands-on experience, we offer students a distinctive pathway from the classroom to meaningful legal careers. Bob and Joan’s generosity will allow us to build on these strengths and equip the future generations of lawyers with the skills to lead in an increasingly complex legal profession.”

The Robert A. Clifford College of Law, founded in 1897 and part of the university since 1912, has helped shape the development of the legal profession in Chicago and the nation through outstanding legal education with a commitment to an exceptional student experience. Its network of more than 16,000 alumni includes partners in law firms, counsel to businesses and non-profit organizations, judges and state officials, whose career success is founded on their DePaul education.

It was 2021 and he was in the Austin offices of Reid Collins, the high-flying litigation boutique with a mastery of plaintiff financial litigation. He was on a team assembling a complex shareholder derivative action against insiders of a China-headquartered company incorporated in the Cayman Islands.

His assignment? Help draft a motion for injunctive relief seeking to prevent the insiders from further looting the company.

In a world of young lawyers, a challenging and complex task, but, really, just another Thursday night.

In Aaron Brown’s world, another day forward on the long way home.

His gut told him to focus on the money trail that the documents could show to prove Renren insiders stripped a billion-dollar investment portfolio and took it for themselves. Around 1 a.m., he surfaced a document.

Its title? “Exit Strategy.”

It was a smoking billion-dollar gun.

“You cannot make this stuff up,” Brown says.

Hidden in a morass of tens of thousands of technical financial documents, “Exit Strategy” laid bare the insiders’ plan to raid the company of its assets.

The Renren case settled not long after – for $300M – at the time becoming the only recent shareholder derivative lawsuit involving a foreign headquartered and incorporated company brought under foreign law in a U.S. court.

Fast forward five years and it’s déjà vu all over again.

Except Brown is now a new partner, and this time he led the derivative case brought by Oasis Investments II Master Fund. Ltd. on behalf of Fang Holdings Limited, a China-headquartered company, against its controlling shareholder and directors. In a settlement approved in February, he and the Reid Collins team delivered significant monetary relief, as well as corporate governance reforms benefitting minority shareholders. It’s only the second successful shareholder derivative suit in which derivative standing under Cayman law was established in a U.S. Court.

A Crash Landing

Brown's arrival at Reid Collins in the summer of 2014 was not conventional.

Scratch that. It was an epic leap of faith by founder Bill Reid, who had known Brown and his family for years. Because Brown had just torched his own life.

Brown comes from a family of lawyers – mother, father, siblings all lawyers.

His dad, Alan, was a legend in the South Texas criminal defense bar. A good, old-fashioned trial gunslinger.

“He tried more than 100 jury trials in his heyday, dealing with death, drugs and sex with a specialty in deadly force self defense,” says Brown, who regularly accompanied his dad, helping to pick juries and other fun tasks for a kid.

His mom, Jean, is a family law attorney, which may be even worse “because people and emotions and kids and money and stuff gets so messy,” he says.

Boy, does it ever. Wait for it ...

Anyway, a typical dinner table conversation at the Brown home started with murder and ended in ugly divorce.

Young Aaron could not get enough.

“I remember him showing me a picture of a body when I was too young to look at a picture of a body and it had been pulverized with a baseball bat. And my dad was going to have to put on a self-defense case. And I would sit there, I was just a kid, and brainstorm with him.

“I’ve been around the law my entire life. I’ve known from seven years old I would be a lawyer,” he says.

Brown has seen it from the inside, as well.

By the age of 15, he was deep in the party scene. “Really, my whole life was drugs and alcohol from 15 to 21,” he says. He made it to college in Fort Worth. But his life was a haze.

“I pretty much chemically managed my life,” he says. Despite that, through Reid, he had secured a spot at Reid Collins for the summer between his junior and senior years. He planned to follow in his father’s footsteps as a criminal defense lawyer, having caught the bug watching as his dad sussed out everyone he met, getting a feel for them – and how they reacted to whatever case he was handling at the moment. Reid Collins seemed a decent gig to experience the private practice side on his way to law school.

One last night out before reporting to the firm. May 19, 2014. Joined by his favorite companions – drugs and alcohol – he went out for the night. He flipped the car and a passenger was severely injured. Brown’s life had reached a crossroads – change or die.

Your choice.

“I really was at a point there where it was up or down – a fork in the road. Am I going to pick up the pieces or am I going to just basically live this crazy life and probably die or end up behind bars?”

On July 14, 2014, he called Reid and said, "Look, man, I got in all this trouble and I’m trying to pick up the pieces of my life. I know that's not ideal for your firm, but if you'll still have me, I'd love to still come."

Reid was headed to Europe for the summer with his family. He said the door was still open.

“I believe that if you hang in there and do the next right thing, you can get over this," Reid said. "If you want to be the one that's taking off to Europe someday with your family, hang around with me for the summer and keep your nose clean. And I think you can overcome all this."

Brown went into treatment, a 12-step program, residing at a sober living house in Austin. He had a pending legal case and his prospects were tough.

“I had hurdles in front of me that I had created,” he says.

Unsure if Reid was just being nice, Brown arrived at the firm’s offices. He found a new type of family – Keith Cohan, Jeremy Wells, Scott Saldaña, Nate Palmer, Josh Bruckerhoff, Greg Schwegmann – who took him in and provided a new type of role model as he put his life back together.

His feet starting to touch ground once more, he knew he had to find a way back to school. He had been “politely asked to leave my prior university and not come back,” Brown recalls. But no other school would take him because of his pending criminal case from the wreck.

I’ve been around the law my entire life. I’ve known from seven years old I would be a lawyer.

“Bill made it clear to me, ‘When you get back in school, dude, there is zero excuse for not earning all As. You're capable. You just need to treat it correctly. I've seen you here long enough. You have the power to control this situation if you're back in.’”

So Brown found a school in Austin – St. Edward’s University. And he started just showing up, presenting himself in the Admissions Office.

“No. Not now,” they said.

He’d show up again, stating how long he’d been clean and sober. Giving his law firm recommendation. The good stuff he’d been doing.

No. Not now.

Finally, his persistence paid off. He told the admissions director, “Ma'am, I don't know what I have to do to prove this to you, but I want this more than anyone in the world. I made a terrible mistake and I take accountability and responsibility and I really need a second chance to get my life back.’”

OK, but ...

St. Edward’s admitted him on one condition: he was not allowed to drive on campus. So he parked off campus and ran to class.

“I don’t know if I was scared of Bill or just inspired by him,” says Brown.

Probably 50/50 for those who know Bill.

Paint the Wall

Brown immersed himself in the firm that summer – from painting a wall to filing documents, grabbing screen shots of sales figures for a class action and helping pick a jury in a nine-figure trial.

He helped paralegals. He helped lawyers. He carried bags. He served as a mock juror. He sat in on trials, mediations, negotiations and client-development meetings.

He caught the bug of the firm’s teamwork and cases involving high-stakes complex financial disputes that often require years of investigation and persistence – a different path than the criminal defense path he had planned.

“I learned what responsibility looked like in the most difficult, high-stakes cases,” Brown says.

Brown’s first real case found him working with Bill Reid and partner Barbara Balliette on behalf of a five-year-old boy who had suffered a traumatic brain injury after he nearly drowned in a community swimming pool. It was not Reid Collins' typical commercial case, but it was one that hit close to home for Reid, whose son was a similar age.

At what was supposed to be a final dinner that first summer, Reid asked Brown to help figure out what had happened.

Brown had begun to glimpse a new path for his life.

He took the boy’s case seriously and stayed.

Brown began building out the factual record. The boy had been going for swim lessons and was found on the bottom of the pool, where he had been for more than four minutes. Brown located witnesses. He researched lifeguarding schools.

What started as an offhand assignment became an early indication of how Brown approached problems. He did not wait for ownership to be formally assigned before taking responsibility for the work.

“It activated that spark of wanting to investigate, wanting to figure out what happened, wanting to right a wrong, those aspects that the law really inspires in me and make me like practicing law,” says Brown.

I learned what responsibility looked like in the most difficult, high-stakes cases.

He would call and survey parents who hung out at the pool to get their accounts and gathered videos. He found a safety expert. He found the foremost expert in Texas on special needs trusts, which the boy would need from any settlement.

They resolved the case. “That was my first real case and my first real taste of making an impact at the law firm in a case,” says Brown.

And then there was the wall at the office. A preposterous task, really. The notion was to paint it to transform it into a dry-erase board with special paint. Brown had never painted a wall in his life. So he bounced between investigating the boy’s accident and painting the wall for the firm, while traveling to jury trials with Reid.

He picked up kids from school, picked up drycleaning, made coffee. “I called myself the investigator, and that’s what everyone called me. But the wall was just … all I’ll say is that they never asked me to paint another wall,” Brown says.

The Second Chance

Brown finished college with more than a 4.0, earning student of the year award in the Jewish studies department.

The booze and alcohol were gone – he’s now more than 12 years sober – but don’t for one minute think he doesn’t still follow his own path. Much like Reid ...

After completing his undergraduate degree, it was time to go to law school. He got decent scores on his LSAT but not enough to get into the University of Texas. So he came up with a plan – to attend St. Mary’s School of Law in San Antonio for a year then transfer.

"I don't know, man, if you don't transfer, we like you and all, but to be honest, I don't think we're going to be able to hire a St. Mary's person," Reid told Brown.

Now, it’s more than possible Reid was providing some of his psychic jiu-jitsu motivation, but it had its intended impact. Brown enrolled in St. Mary’s, making the 80-mile commute each day, gave it his all, and ranked number two in his class at the end of his 1L year. He transferred to UT and graduated with honors.

Side note: Brown also learned the power of prestige at St. Mary’s. He saw a number of great students there, the equal of those at his future law school. The competition because of its lesser ranking had Brown and a gold-medal Olympian swimmer side-eyeing one another, both knowing they were head-to-head for a coveted transfer slot.

"He was a fierce competitor and we were friends," says Brown. But they were also in competition as both hoped to transfer to Texas Law .

Brown and swimmer James Feigen both transferred to Texas. “He had a really big impact on me. Sitting next to someone who is a gold-medal Olympic swimmer raised the bar for me, hopping into a race with the best.”

Brown continued working at Reid Collins throughout law school, and in 2020 graduated with honors. The next stop on the comeback? Admission to the bar. Note to future lawyers: There are many reasons not to f your life and admission to a state bar is one of them.

Brown had served 40 days in jail, which he did while attending St. Edward’s, driving to Fort Worth every weekend to check into jail for the equivalent of 40 nights.

“It was a wake-up call. I looked at my life like Ebenezer Scrooge of Christmas past or Christmas present or the future. And this was not where I wanted my life to end up,” says Brown. “The Universe had given me a second chance and I was going to take it.”

It activated that spark of wanting to investigate, wanting to figure out what happened, wanting to right a wrong – those aspects that the law really inspires in me.

He had drawn a suspended sentence and eight years of probation. In 2019, he made a compelling case to get off probation early for good behavior. But Texas still wanted him to show more time of good behavior after probation ended.

Where there’s a will there’s a way. So Brown took the Universal Bar Exam in New Mexico, was admitted there, then transferred into Texas. For good measure, he also got a New York bar license.

“The point of this is I’ve had to always investigate, find a path, get a solution,” says Brown. “In this instance, I applied those skills to become a lawyer because of specific hurdles I put in my own life.”

Reid Collins "in a way raised me," Brown says. "From very early on, they gave me real responsibility and expected me to take ownership of it. That changes how you see the work and see yourself. It makes you accountable for results."

Reid describes one of Brown's defining strengths simply: Once he learns something, he can repeat it. Or, as Brown says, "Once I've been somewhere, I can always return."

That ability has become a hallmark of his budding career, an unusual persistence if you will. The Fang shareholder derivative case is the most recent example.

In Renren, Brown helped lay a trail for bringing claims involving Cayman-incorporated, China-headquartered companies in New York courts when the misconduct allegedly occurred in New York's financial markets.

"The Fang case had similar jurisdictional theories and factual undertones," Brown says. "It was about being exposed to a type of case, learning the structure, and then applying it to a new set of facts."

He also saw time and again the teamwork that makes Reid Collins tick. Alongside him on Fang was one of the Renren architects, Michael Yoder, as well as Reid, Yonah Jaffe and Seth Roye.

An Unusual Persistence

For Brown, Fang turned as much on endurance as strategy and replication of the Renren framework.

The jurisdictional theory created the path into court. The team fought multiple motions to dismiss on jurisdictional grounds and prevailed. “That was really Michael Yoder, his wisdom and expertise,” says Brown.

The case was ultimately shaped by what followed: discovery disputes, repeated motions, sanctions practice, and years of litigation over whether the defendants had complied with their obligations.

No "Exit Strategy" this time.

Instead, the case turned on persistence. The less glamorous work requires a special kind of patience, Brown says. “We had the discipline to stick to our guns and create a record that made reality impossible to ignore.”

In Fang, that perseverance paid off. The court ultimately struck the defendants' pleadings after finding intentional destruction of documents, repeated violations of court orders, and deliberate efforts to frustrate discovery uncovered by the Reid Collins team. The ruling transformed the case and settlement followed.

The result delivered a tremendous win to Fang and its shareholders: $30M in cash directly to minority shareholders, more than 20.4M shares of CIH Holdings Limited transferred back to Fang, and governance reforms designed to strengthen oversight of future insider transactions – a remarkable outcome in a shareholder representative action.

"It's a testament to rolling your sleeves up and diving into the more mundane parts of a case, like discovery battles" Brown says. "That work may not be what people think of first when they imagine high-stakes litigation, but it can significantly impact the outcome.

“It's also a testament to our team," says Brown.

The Universe had given me a second chance and I was going to take it.

Brown and Reid traveled to New York for the final approval hearing, scheduled for Thursday, February 5. Although the settlement provided minority shareholders with a substantial recovery on their claims, the hearing turned contentious. Several Fang shareholders sought to either reduce Reid Collins’ fee request or augment the settlement.

What was expected to be a one-day hearing that Thursday turned into a contentious proceeding requiring an extra day. Brown and Reid left the courtroom Thursday evening planning to return the following Monday.

As Brown turned his phone on, he saw a flurry of messages. His wife, Lindsay, who was 8½ months pregnant, was in the hospital after a fall. He immediately headed to the airport and home.

Despite planning to reconvene on Monday, Friday morning, the Court notified the parties it would reconvene that very afternoon. Knowing he was about to be stuck on an airplane, Reid responded, "I defer to my able partner, Aaron Brown."

His very young partner – whom, an objector argued, because he was only five years out of law school, did not merit the requested fee.

Justice Andrew Borok dismissed the point. Having presided over the litigation for years, he said, he was well positioned to assess Brown’s contributions irrespective of his youth.

By the time Reid landed, Brown had secured one of the most important settlements in the firm’s history, underscoring the firm’s philosophy to hire the best and entrust them with real responsibility.

“I started at the firm helping paint a wall. Twelve years later, I’m a lawyer leading and winning significant cases,” says Brown. “Not every firm gives someone that kind of opportunity. I’m grateful this one did.”

Years of exposure to complex theories, difficult cases and experienced lawyers shaped how Brown approaches problems.

In his personal life, he’s married and has a daughter, Josephine (3 years old) and a son, Robert (6 months). As part of his redemption path, he shares his experience with others. Over the years he's taken his story to dozens of schools and organizations, sharing it with thousands young adults grappling with the choices he once made. “I wanted to help others learn from my poor choices,” he says. “I tell kids I’m not expecting them to make perfect choices after this, but I expect you not to drink and drive after this.”

Professionally, he learned how to build a record, identify leverage points, and keep moving a case forward even when the process becomes frustrating, he says. Brown credits much of that development to proximity and solid mentorship – the opportunity to watch Reid Collins’ lawyers handle difficult problems and entrust him with more responsibility.

"Being around Bill and this firm has been instrumental to my development as a lawyer," Brown says. "I had the chance to learn from the best up close and, over time, figure out how to carry those lessons forward in my own way."

He watched Reid lead complex cases not only with force, but with generosity – making time for younger lawyers, bringing them into strategy discussions, and giving them opportunities to grow.

"Bill is incredibly brilliant and unbelievably generous," Brown says. "He gives people opportunities and he gives them his time, which is the single most valuable resource on earth."

“It’s humbling to see how my partners and I can write the next chapter of this firm,” Brown says.

When looking at the history of modern environmental law, one name comes up again and again: Victor "Vic" Sher.

Since the 1980s, Sher has leveraged his legal expertise to tackle some of the biggest threats to the environment and to champion communities impacted by those threats. Along the way, he has taken on some of the world’s most powerful corporations – and biggest law firms – and won.

He has led groundbreaking forest protection lawsuits. He was a member of the trial team in the first MTBE water contamination case to go to trial, utilizing an innovative products liability law strategy. And, in the last decade, his firm has represented states, tribes, and local governments suing fossil fuel giants, alleging that the companies have known for decades their products led to harmful effects on the environment and failed to either mitigate those harms or warn consumers about them. The lawsuits claim that this “campaign of deception” led to climate-change-induced harms that place enormous financial burdens on the communities impacted by them.

While Sher has pioneered these approaches in court, he doesn’t think of them as outside-the-box.

“I don’t view our work as being steeped in novelty. Our cases are firmly based in traditional elements,” says Sher. “We simply apply established legal principals to new factual circumstances.”

The defense response has been that “‘this is stretching the law beyond where it was ever intended to go,'" Sher says.

To that end, Judge Jeffrey P. Crabtree, who rejected motions to dismiss the City and County of Honolulu’s climate deception lawsuit, commented on the perceived novelty of the legal claims.

“Here, the causes of action may seem new, but in fact are common. They just seem new – due to the unprecedented allegations involving causes and effects of fossil fuels and climate change,” he wrote. “Common law historically tries to adapt to such new circumstances.”

Across the board, defendants – multi-hundred-billion-dollar household names like Exxon Mobil, BP and Shell – have vehemently refuted the climate deception claims in court. Sher has also faced intense political pushback, particularly in the current administration, with President Trump issuing an executive order calling climate deception lawsuits a threat to national security.

Sher is unintimidated.

“I’ve always believed that the courts are one of the last level playing fields, if not the only one left, available to communities against huge multi-national corporations,” says Sher.

Along with co-founder Matt Edling, Sher has been building out a team to compete and win on that playing field. In the 10 years since its founding, Sher Edling’s climate docket has grown such that one in every four Americans now lives in a jurisdiction that has brought a climate deception lawsuit. His clients include nine states, the District of Columbia, two Native American tribes, and cities spanning four more states – and that’s just the climate docket. On the water side, his firm represents water districts and authorities nationwide, pursuing cleanup funds for water supplies contaminated with compounds like 1,4-dioxane, PCB’s and PFAS.

Sher and his firm have changed the shape of environmental law by applying established law to of-the-moment claims. The only question is where the law – and the firm – is headed next.

FROM OWLS TO PUBLIC WATER SUPPLIES

Sher’s career first gained national prominence with the northern spotted owl, a vital indicator species of the health of ancient forests in the Pacific Northwest. Starting in the late 1980s and early 1990s, Sher worked with the Sierra Club Legal Defense Fund (now known as Earthjustice – a name adopted during Sher’s turn as President of the organization from 1994-1997). Earthjustice was then, and is still, the largest nonprofit public interest environmental law group in the world.

The spotted owl cases fundamentally changed the federal government’s approach to managing biodiversity on federal lands, including by dramatically limiting logging on public lands in the temperate rainforests of Oregon and Washington. Sher’s work was heralded as among the most significant public lands cases in U.S. history.

The fight wasn’t easy. Sher was up against a multimillion-dollar PR campaign by the timber industry to frame the cases as protecting owls over American jobs, rather than about ecosystem health. These campaigns, he says, motivated political interference with court processes.

“As you gain traction in court, large economic interests who are threatened will look to legislative schemes to try to protect themselves,” he says. It’s an approach he says still affects his cases today – with an increasing scale and diversity of tactics.

Upon leaving the nonprofit sector, Sher focused on groundbreaking water contamination litigation, using a products liability legal theory to sue manufacturers of products containing harmful chemical compounds that spread to the groundwater that supplies homes and businesses. Some of his initial cases centered around DBCP – a chemical used to control nematodes in crops that is persistent and mobile in groundwater and also “one of the most effective testicular cancer-causing agents ever known,” Sher says.

Then, in a turning point for his career, Sher sued Exxon Corp., Chevron, Shell and other large oil companies on behalf of the South Lake Tahoe Public Utility district. Sher argued that the companies’ gasoline, blended with additive MTBE, contaminated the district’s drinking water and therefore constituted a defective product. The claim was original: Instead of centering on liability for leaking tanks, Sher’s claim focused on the production and marketing of the gasoline itself. The companies settled for $69M in 2001, after a jury trial against Shell that led to a verdict finding the company acted with malice.

'I don’t view our work as being steeped in novelty. Our cases are firmly based in traditional elements,' says Sher. 'We simply apply established legal principals to new factual circumstances.'

By 2003, Sher began his own law firm, San Francisco-based Sher Leff, focused exclusively on representing state and local governments and public water providers through this now-proven defective product model.

“For a compelling case, you need three things: A serious injury to a plaintiff, a strong, science-based connection between the defendants’ conduct and that injury and a compelling story of knowledge and culpability,” Sher explains. The MTBE cases were so successful because they clearly contained all of those elements – backed by unassailable legal theory.

“You build the cases to be middle-of-the-runway, traditional legal claims,” Sher explains.

Combining those traditional claims with an innovative perspective allowed Sher to build a leading water practice nationally. He was designated national co-counsel for plaintiffs in a multi-district MTBE litigation; his clients in the MDL ultimately recovered more than $100M as part of a nationwide settlement. In 2008, the City of New York asked him to serve as lead trial counsel in its case against ExxonMobil and other oil corporations over city wells in Queens contaminated with MTBE. After a four-month jury trial, Sher and his legal team secured a landmark $104.7M jury verdict against Exxon, with a total recovery of more than $125M, a result affirmed on appeal. 

When Sher joined up with partner Matt Edling in 2016 to found his current firm, Sher Edling, water contamination remained a central focus of the firm – and still is today. In 2025, the firm’s attorneys secured more than $400M in historic settlements for their water provider clients with the 3M Company, DuPont and others as part of the national In re: Aqueous Film-Forming Foams Products Liability Litigation (the “AFFF MDL”), which concerns a firefighting foam containing PFAS. The litigation is one of the largest contamination MDLs in the country.

THE CLIMATE “CAMPAIGN OF DECEPTION”

While water contamination is a large and growing part of the firm’s practice, just a year into the firm’s life, Sher and team began filing the first groundbreaking climate-deception lawsuits on behalf of public entities. In these suits, Sher was no longer alleging that corporations were creating defective products, but rather that they failed to warn about and proactively distorted the direct link between the use of fossil fuel products and climate change, which has cost state and local governments dearly in harmful impacts from storms, rising sea levels, public health threats and more.

That failure to warn is the central tenet of the “campaign of deception” that lies at the heart of all Sher’s climate deception cases. Supporting Sher in City and County of Honolulu v. Sunoco LP, expert Dr. Naomi Oreskes, Professor of the History of Science and Affiliated Professor of Earth and Planetary Sciences at Harvard, declared:

“The fossil fuel industry and its allies and surrogates created an organized campaign to foster and sustain doubt about anthropogenic global warming and prevent meaningful action. They did this by influencing consumers and the general public. It is my expert opinion that Defendants have participated in this campaign for more than the last half century, and that their behavior continues today.”

Oreskes goes on to argue that fossil fuel companies “developed a sophisticated understanding of the link between emissions from their products, atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations, and potentially dire climate-related impacts” as early as 1965. Yet, she says, the corporations never publicly acknowledged the consequences of fossil fuel dominance.

“The company has to issue warnings commensurate with the risks,” Sher says. “Their knowledge of the risks goes back to the mid-‘60s, and they never warned.”

The Honolulu case, which began in 2020, follows that now-familiar model for Sher’s climate-change cases. His successful argument before the Supreme Court of Hawai‘i established City & County of Honolulu et al. v. Sunoco LP et al. as the first tort-based climate deception case in history to prevail on motions dismiss all the way up to and through a state supreme court. Defendants sought review from the Supreme Court of the United States but were denied in January 2025. At the start of this year, the state trial court denied the defendants’ motions for summary judgement and allowed the suit to continue.

“These cases are not about solving climate change and they’re not about climate change policy,” Sher emphasizes, referencing an opposing position that has come up in other cases. “They’re about obtaining the resources for communities to survive a warming world that is worse because of the failure to warn and wrongful promotion and marketing by these companies.”

In other current cases, in 2023 Sher Edling began representing two Native American tribes, the Makah Indian Tribe and the Shoalwater Bay Indian Tribe, both located in coastal northern Washington. As storms and rising sea levels increase rapidly in the area, both tribes have been forced to move homes and infrastructure now at risk of flooding – conditions which the legal team alleges stem from global warming driven by deceptive practices from major oil companies.

Timothy J. Greene Sr., Makah Tribal Council Chairman at the time, declared, ““We are seeing the effects of the climate crisis on our people, our land, and our resources. The costs and consequences to us are overwhelming. We intend to hold these companies accountable for hiding the truth about climate change and the effects of burning fossil fuels. And we aim to force them to help pay for the high costs of surviving the catastrophe caused by the climate crisis.”

[These cases] about obtaining the resources for communities to survive a warming world.

Then-Shoalwater Bay Chairwoman Charlene Nelson added, “These oil companies knew their products were dangerous, yet they did nothing to mitigate those dangers or warn any of us about them, for decades. Now we are facing hundreds of millions of dollars in costs to relocate our community to higher ground and protect our people, our property, and our heritage. These companies need to be held accountable for that.”

PREPARING FOR THE LONG-HAUL

In court, Sher has argued that these lawsuits do not interfere with energy production, but instead center on deceptive corporate practices – comparing them to landmark lawsuits against the tobacco industry.

Those arguments have not always succeeded; some cases have been dismissed. But Sher is accustomed to political and legal resistance, going as far back as that early litigation surrounding the spotted owl with Earthjustice. He is prepared to fight for the long-haul, with patience and tenacity that has carried through all his work.

“[Both water and climate cases] are against defendants who are large and well-resourced, who have an infinite number of lawyers working for them,” Sher explains. “So, the arc of those cases is slow because they will throw every possible impediment out there.”

Sher credits the team that surrounds him, saying he perseveres due to his choice of his colleagues and building strong relationships with his clients.

When asked what makes his work most fulfilling, Sher says the answer is twofold: One part, working on cases that matter. The other, working with people who share a sense of community and purpose.

Ten years in, Sher says that his current firm is the best team of lawyers he’s yet assembled in his legal career.

“We are proud to have secured more than $1B in relief for our clients so far,” says Sher. “But we have our work cut out for us as we enter our second decade at Sher Edling. Corporate power and influence are increasing, at the very time that traditional safeguards for the environment, public health, and community resilience are being dismantled. It’s our job as mission-driven lawyers to help reset that imbalance in our communities. We are ready for that fight.”

That spirit will be needed as Sher continues his commitment to protect people and the planet. As he has shown time and time again, his determination, innovation and record of success make this environmental litigator one challenge profit-driven corporations struggle to overcome.

It’s a locally known fact that the first thing you ask someone from St. Louis is, “Where did you go to high school?”

Kirk Stange, a St. Louis-area native (who went to Eureka High), has learned the “Where’d you go to high school” of 30 cities across Missouri and nationwide. He has built his firm, Stange Law Firm, from the ground up to become a recognized name in family law. Starting in St. Louis nearly 20 years ago, the firm now boasts 30 offices spanning ten states. He’s always built from scratch in each city, learning local customs and personality and folding them into a unified, firm-wide mission. With the tagline, “Here to help you rebuild your life,” the firm aids clients through dissolution of marriage, child and spousal support arrangements, property division for high-net-worth individuals and more.

With Stange’s affinity for effective local marketing, the firm is continuing to grow. They expanded into Houston and Austin in Texas and Louisville and Lexington in Kentucky last year; this past February, they added on Nashville.

But starting a franchise firm wasn’t always Stange’s plan. Initially, he received his history teaching certificate for 7^th-12^th graders. His business management experience, meanwhile, came from Six Flags, an amusement park just outside St. Louis. He worked there starting as a Log Flume ride supervisor in 1991 to managing a third of the park in 1997, the summer before law school.

Though unexpected, both experiences have proved pivotal for Stange’s long-term success: Managing at Six Flags helped him learn how to guide different kinds of people, and his teaching degree allows him to educate clients, coach his employees, and keep law firm managers and family law lawyers abreast of his findings through CLEs and prolific blog-writing. A thought leader, he maintains both a family law blog, familylawheadquarters.com and a firm management blog, lawfirmpracticemanagementadvice.com, where he covers business management, marketing and technology.

Stange is a member of the Lawdragon 500 Leading Family Lawyers in recognition of both his prowess in court and his firm leadership.

Lawdragon: You have built your name in family law, but that wasn’t your original intention when you became a lawyer, right?

Kirk Stange: That's right. I went to law school hoping to do constitutional law, civil rights. I was interested in politics at that time, but I thought I might get to something more involved in those areas. Family law was not what I anticipated.

LD: Tell me about that transition. It was while you were at a small law firm, right?

KS: That's right. I worked at a very small firm in West St. Louis County. The three gentlemen there were all politically active, which is why I went to work there, in part. But one of the partners there did family law, and he went out on medical leave for a while. They had me handle his cases while he was out, and that's how family law began. Before I knew it, people were referring other family law clients to me, and it just built on itself.

LD: And are there any matters you’ve handled that stand out?

KS: I've had lots of cases where the fact patterns blow your mind. Some of the toughest cases I've had to deal with involved allegations of sexual abuse, whether it was my client raising it against the other party, or the other party raising it against my client. Those are horrible cases, but they happen in family law. One time I represented a dad in a custody case and the mom tried to hire a hitman to kill my client in the middle of the case.

LD: Wow. I don't think I've heard something quite like that happening in a case.

KS: Yeah. She ended up going to prison. The hitman she was trying to hire was an undercover cop. So that was a shocking case. I remember having a case one time where the opposing party committed suicide in the middle of the case.

This is a heavy area of the law. I think a lot of lawyers are really good lawyers conceptually, but they can't practice in this area of law because these kinds of cases. This is the part that, early in my career, had me thinking, "Do I really want to do this?” But there was a huge need. People need a good lawyer to get them through these times. Not to get too religious, but I’m a big believer that God has a plan. Things happen for a reason in life. And for whatever reason, this is what I was supposed to do, even though it wasn't the original plan that I had for myself.

LD: What characteristics do you think make someone a good family lawyer?

KS: I read an article by a family law lawyer early in my career, when I was struggling with this practice. The hardest piece about this area of the law is in a way it can feel like a circular firing squad. Your clients can be mad at you. The other attorney can be giving you trouble. And judges can be impatient. But in the article, the lawyer referenced what she thought were the two most important traits of a successful family lawyer – not from a litigation perspective, but from a mindset perspective. One, having empathy for your clients is key. You have to be able to listen to your clients, mirror their concerns back to them. As attorneys, we're referred to as counselors too. But then the other piece, which is equally as important, is boundaries. You have to be able to emotionally separate. It’s challenging, but you can't live vicariously through your clients. You do have to set reasonable limits. Empathy and boundaries are what gets attorneys through these cases. That combination can make somebody last for a long time. So I always kind of joke, it's like "Phantom of the Opera." It's the two faces you have to show your client.

LD: Are there any misconceptions, either from the legal industry or from clients, that people have about family law that you see most often?

KS: Oh man, there are so many. I think a lot of people oversimplify the process. They think, "Well, I just want a divorce. This ought to be easy. Why does it take so long?" The reality is, in a divorce, two people may want the divorce, so that makes it uncontested. But you still have to have an agreement on the disposition of the case in order to resolve it. You have to divide all the marital property and debt. You have to deal with child custody, and on that you have to agree not just on terms, but days of the week and a parenting plan and specifics, child support, spousal support, attorney fees. In a lot of cases, people agree on 70, 80 percent of those issues, but they disagree on 10, 20, 30 percent of that, and that hangs up the whole case. And it's a backed-up court system.

LD: That makes sense. Focusing on your firm specifically, next year is your 20th anniversary. Does the firm look now how you expected when you started?

KS: No. It's been a wild ride because it's not anything I ever really expected, but it took off. If you talked to me 30 years ago, I would've never contemplated it.

In a lot of cases, people agree on 70, 80 percent of those issues, but they disagree on 10, 20, 30 percent of that, and that hangs up the whole case.

LD: Talking about the growth of the firm, what made you want to create something different in family law by expanding?

KS: It started originally on a smaller scale just in the St. Louis area. We opened in St. Louis County, then I put an office in St. Charles County, Missouri. And then I put one down in Jefferson County, Missouri. And what I learned from some of this early expansion, was at the time, not many firms had a good webpage that could compete. Our webpage will shoot to the top of the search results and that led to clients. Eventually I had an office in every county surrounding St. Louis County. And then I was like, well, there's nowhere else to go here.

LD: Got to change states. How do you choose where to grow now that you're up to 30 offices in ten states?

KS: There are a lot of components to it. A lot of it is geographically contiguous, so that makes it easier to manage. But Texas, to me, was a different thing. That was more a statement opening. People say, "Well, you're Midwest firm." And I'm like, "Well, let's not be just in the Midwest anymore." I like Texas, too. I actually own a condo in Galveston.

LD: People might think, oh, well, this is just about me and my wife or me and my husband. I don't need a whole firm network. But what are the advantages clients see from the model you’ve created?

KS: People don't like to travel long distances for a lawyer. So, having a local office with a local attorney makes it very convenient for them. If you look at Walgreens or CVS, they're everywhere, right? It’s convenient. So having a local office with a local attorney, in my mind, was similar to that. Other people would always ask, "Well, do you buy up other firms?" I've never bought another firm.

LD: Why is that?

KS: One, buying up another firm would cost some bucks. I'd rather take that money and put it in the marketing than buying up other firms. Two, other firms do things differently. So if you buy them up and you want them to change and do things your way, to me, that seemed challenging. But we’re different that way.

I also hear a lot about firms expanding with offices that are more like unstaffed satellites. Appointment-only kind of offices. The unique thing about our firm is that our offices are all full-time with one exception at this point, which is the one in Ellisville, Missouri, West St. Louis County. Every other office is full-time staffed.

LD: From a leadership perspective, how do you establish those same principles and culture across so many offices?

KS: That's one of the most challenging pieces. When I was a Six Flags supervisor, I was supposed to make a certain number of rounds each day. You go to all your rides once, that's one round. You go to a second time, that's a second round. I've got other partners and directors and we make rounds. We have to get to these offices. It's challenging with as many offices as we have, but making rounds is one way.

We also do a lot of meetings at our firm. We have attorney meetings on Zoom every week. We do a firm meeting once a month. I also have every attorney do a weekly pulse check with a more senior attorney at the firm. So every attorney does a weekly meeting with a more experienced attorney to go through their cases with them, to give them guidance and supervision. Of course, at times the culture could be different by office a little bit.

LD: That makes sense geographically and personality-wise. But is there a defining set of principles or an ethos for the firm?

KS: Well, our catchphrase, which we have in all of our ads, it's, "Here to help you rebuild your life." So our goal has got to be helping clients rebuild their life. So first and foremost, the clients have to come first. Without that, no business is going to do well.

LD: Can you tell me about some trends that you're seeing in family law?

KS: Paternity cases are one. Four out of 10 kids are born out of wedlock in the United States. When these relationships split, then you end up with custody and support cases. Next to divorce, they're by far the most common types of cases we deal with. You don't deal with property and debt division and you don't deal with spousal maintenance or alimony, but otherwise the procedure and the process compared to a divorce is remarkably similar.

The clients have to come first. Without that, no business is going to do well.

There's also been a wave of shared parenting coming more to the forefront. Early in my career, it would be more like a custodial parent and then the other parent would have every other weekend, and a night during the week, and some summer and holiday time. Missouri, now, has a presumption of equal parenting, and you see more and more states going there.

Early in my career, I would hear the psychological research shows it's better for kids to live in one home and not have to go back and forth in a suitcase. But now, the psychological research shows it's best when kids have both their parents in their lives, so 50/50 custody is actually better, and it results in less conflict. So that is a trend that is gradually sweeping across the country, which is definitely something very different from when I first started doing family law.

LD: Are there any changes you’re advocating for in family law?

KS: Spousal maintenance is an interesting topic area. Some states call it alimony; some states call it spousal maintenance. What I see more and more states doing is they have formulas for maintenance. I actually like it. So they'll look at the length of the marriage, the income of the parties and then they can sort of objectively compute maintenance and the length of time it'll need to be paid. I think that creates more certainty for people, results in less litigation and it's generally a better system. In Missouri, it's the Wild West of maintenance still.

LD: Interesting. And looking back on now nearly 20 years of the firm, what have you found most fulfilling about building this practice?

KS: When I hear stories from former clients and people that say we help them through difficult times, obviously that's key and the most important piece. But a close second to me is that I've had some employees who worked for me for a long time. The fact that they've had a fulfilling career at our firm and support their family off it, and they have a good life based on what we build – that brings joy to me, too. If it wasn't for a lot of these people around me who stuck with me for a long, long time, through difficult and challenging times, this firm wouldn't be what it is.

Few corporate lawyers are better placed to take tech startups from “garage to global” than Louis Lehot, a Big Law partner at Foley & Lardner’s Silicon Valley office in Palo Alto, California.

“How do you help a company from the very beginning when it's just an idea on a whiteboard?” he asks. “That’s the garage. The global part is the dream.”

Lehot’s own career has followed a similar path. His journey in Big Law began as a file clerk at Shearman & Sterling in the early '90s. Though he’s known he’d be a lawyer since the age of seven, the file clerk job filled a secondary need: “I was trying to pay for beer money at Georgetown as an undergraduate,” Lehot remembers. He was the king of odd jobs: “I was running around delivering documents on my little moped around Washington, D.C., making sandwiches, making copies, doing whatever needed to be doing. And I turned that into a paralegal job.”

From there, his legal career took off – and, like many of the startups he’s counseled since, went global. After working in cross-border corporate finance in Europe for Shearman & Sterling, Lehot made it to Silicon Valley in 2005 as a corporate lawyer at Simpson Thacher & Bartlett specializing in M&A deals, private equity-sponsored leveraged buyouts and capital markets transactions. In 2009, he moved to Sheppard Mullin where he devised that “garage to global” philosophy, helping companies grow “from inception to ideation to commercialization to exit.”

That emphasis continued during stints at Cooley, DLA Piper and L2 Counsel, a boutique firm where he worked from November 2019 until February 2021 when he joined Foley. More than five years later, he is still guiding startups as they secure venture capital and growth equity financing, prepare for an initial public offering or an M&A transaction and navigate the exit. He also represents U.S. and non-U.S. registrants before securities regulators and keeps his finger on the pulse of the ever-changing world of technology.

“The next frontier for law firms is, how do we help companies transform their businesses into AI-first businesses and how do we transform our own business into an AI-first business?” Lehot says.

Lehot spoke recently to Lawdragon about his career in the Silicon Valley hotbed and the challenges of helping companies adapt, transform and grow.

Lawdragon: When you took that gopher job in undergrad, did you know that you wanted to be a lawyer?

Louis Lehot: I knew I was going to be a lawyer when I was seven years old. That was it. At the time, I think I must have thought this meant being a trial lawyer. I had no idea that there was this way of being a business lawyer where I could help everybody win. That was why I quickly pivoted away from litigation: I love the win-win, not win-lose.

LD: Tell us about your early days in Europe at Shearman & Sterling.  

LL: From the early 1990s through the mid 2000s, American lawyers and American law firms were privatizing big European companies and helping them list on the New York Stock Exchange, acquire U.S. companies, or be acquired by U.S. companies. It was the golden age of being a U.S. lawyer abroad. I spent 12 years off and on there, shuttling between New York, Paris, London and other European hubs, helping companies get transactions done.

LD: How did your career progress after Shearman & Sterling?

LL: In 2005, I moved to Simpson Thacher where a group of ex-Shearman lawyers had opened the Palo Alto office just a few years before. I continued helping big companies access the capital markets and I learned how to do M&A. That was when private equity was transforming everything that happens in Silicon Valley. I worked on this small transaction spinning a business out of HP called Avago, which is now known as Broadcom, and on a number of leveraged buyouts, one of which was Seagate, which was making hard drives. 

Then on Christmas Eve 2008, when we were in the thick of the financial crisis, I was thanked for my service, but that I would not be a partner, and to start looking for another job. Big clients like Lehman Brothers and Washington Mutual had declared bankruptcy, so it was a dark time. I had to dig deep inside of myself and say, "What are you going to do next?" I transformed into an emerging growth lawyer helping companies grow from garage to global, meaning from inception to ideation. So I went from Simpson Thacher to Sheppard Mullin in 2009.

“I had to dig deep inside of myself and say, ‘What are you going to do next?’

LD: Can you elaborate on that "garage to global" philosophy and how it's taken you through your whole career?

LL: When you're a lawyer, you need to be relevant to the people around you so that they know when to call you, why to call you, how you can help them. At Shearman & Sterling, they threw me into the swimming pool of these big multinational companies that they had as clients. And then at Simpson Thacher, they threw me in the pool of private equity firms that needed their help. Those kinds of clients require a big institutional law firm and those are not relationships that you generally can develop on your own. It requires a big, giant platform. And so I developed the idea of garage to global as I was learning how to be relevant to the people that could hire me.

Here in Silicon Valley, either they're in a late-stage startup that's going public or they're an early-stage company that they're trying to scale to hyper-growth stage. And so garage to global became, how do you help a company from the very beginning when it's just an idea on a whiteboard? What problems do you have at the very beginning of a company? What's the equity split? What's the intellectual property? How am I going to make money? How am I going to convince an investor to write me a check? Do I have to put them on my board of directors? Does it mean they have control of my company? And what do I do to protect myself? That’s the garage. The global part is the dream. If you make it past the garage, can you make it global?

We had some really early successes with some companies, one of which was called RealD. It had this technology that is still used to help you see a movie in 3D in the movie theater. We helped turn that franchise into a global company and took it public on the New York Stock Exchange in 2010. That was an example of garage to global.

LD: How did your global experience at Shearman & Sterling help you in that work?

LL: It makes you really think about, “It’s great that you filled up all the movie theaters in Los Angeles, but they have a lot of movie theaters in Beijing and all these other parts of the world. How do you access them?” Uniquely “legal” problems are boring. What makes them interesting are the people behind them and the businesses that they operate. How you do business in China versus Europe. What does a handshake mean? What does a contract mean? How do you structure payments? Who gets the technology? Who owns it? How do you go to market?  Do you need a local partner or do you go direct? These are all exciting questions.

LD: From the dot-com bubble bursting to the rise of private equity to the financial crisis, you've seen these markets in the earliest stage of their booms and the lows of their busts. What has that taught you about staying nimble and resilient and forward-thinking? And what is most on your mind for driving ahead now?

LL: For businesses that were created before AI was primary in everything, they have to pivot and redesign the product to be an AI-first product. I think law firms are in the same place right now. We have to figure out a way of leading with AI. We all have AI tools, but how are we going to sell AI to our clients and how do we help them turn into an AI-first business? The big consulting firms have figured out that that's a big business for them to go after, and I think they're making money hand over fist. Law firms have not yet figured out how to turn AI into a product that they are selling. The next frontier for law firms is, how do we help companies transform their businesses into AI-first businesses and how do we transform our own business into an AI-first business?

LD: Are there any steps that you're taking in your practice to transform it into an AI-first business?

LL: I've always had the philosophy that the first-movers in technology disruptions will be the commercial winners. When I was in London in 2001, everybody in New York had a Blackberry, but nobody in London did. So I flew to New York and got myself one and brought it back with me to London. For about a year and a half, because the Europeans were slower to adopt Blackberry, I was every client’s favorite lawyer, because I would answer their emails instantly at whatever time of the day or night (because I had the Blackberry and didn’t need to be logged into my desktop computer), and it was a complete game changer. 

I saw this when I was working at L2 Counsel in a boutique environment. We experimented with a lot of tools that other law firms didn't, one of which was called Kira, which was one of the first AI due diligence platforms. It allowed us to compete with the Big Law firms. I learned during that time that the right thing was always to have technology, because if you have the technology and the right people, you can do amazing things.

LD: That’s so interesting. Then, looking forward, how did you end up at Foley & Lardner?

LL: Ultimately, if you want to be working on the technologies that are most disruptive, that are going to go the most global, you need to have a legal platform that can deliver all the services that your client is going to need. At L2 Counsel, we had gotten to the point where we were not able to access certain matters because we would never have enough people with enough expertise, and the “boutique” platform didn't inspire enough confidence for larger buyers. We knew we needed a bigger firm with more resources to bring to bear, and we needed a big firm that was going to be people-centric, full service and technology-driven.

If you have the technology and the right people, you can do amazing things.

LD: What has the experience been like at Foley? 

LL: From the first moment I met the Foley team through today, they will tell you that their four most important priorities – their pillars – are their people, their culture, their clients and their communities. That really resonated with us, and it has been our touchstone. We operate as a team, as a unit. We operate in a flat structure. We landed with 14 people in February 2021, and we're now over 60 people in 2026. It's about the people and the team and the clients and how we practice.

LD: Do you see yourself continuing to grow the practice now or do you feel you're in a sweet spot?

LL: Do we have areas of growth? Absolutely. And I'm constantly trying to fill them. To give you an example, the way emerging growth companies need labor and employment help is totally different than a big company. I don't call it labor and employment, I call it talent management, meaning it starts with hiring people and then it continues on with retaining people. And then sometimes it's managing those people, and sometimes it's managing them up, managing them toward a more fruitful area of growth, and sometimes it's managing them out.

And so I hired Cathryn Le Regulski, who I had known for 15 years at prior stints at Cooley and DLA, to come over to Foley and help us deliver that for our clients. Not that Foley didn't already have great labor employment lawyers, but they wanted to litigate and investigate, not focusing on what I call “talent management” in the way that we do it on our team on a day-in, day-out basis. That was an example of a hole that we filled. We'll always have holes as the market evolves and we'll continue to try and find the best people.

LD: Can you tell me about some recent engagements that you've been particularly excited about or proud of?

LL: I have a client called Mirantis that started 25 years ago. Immigrants from the Soviet Union formed an IT services company in Silicon Valley doing IT consulting work. Then in 2011, they pivoted and became a hybrid cloud and container orchestration platform, meaning that they were serving companies as they moved their data into the cloud. They became a technology rather than a services company.

They were having very good growth, but then artificial intelligence came along, and if your product hadn't been designed as artificial intelligence from the get-go, it probably wasn't optimized. And so they needed to do this pivot to become an AI-first company. They partnered with an Australian company called IREN to deliver a data center for Nvidia in Texas. It was such a successful collaboration that Nvidia said, "Why don't you guys do more of this?" And we ultimately said, "Why don't we merge?"

So, a company that was growing at a healthy but normal pace suddenly began growing at a hyper-scaling pace.

Another one was a company called Gatik here in Silicon Valley, which has been developing technology to help a mid-sized truck that Pepsi or Walmart might use to deliver product from a regional distribution center to a store. Historically, those have been driven by two people and then you've got people loading at either end. Gatik’s technology will turn that same truck into an autonomous logistics system by having it drive autonomously and then have loading systems so that they can be loaded and unloaded with ease. In June, we helped them close a $200M round of financing with the Qatar Investment Authority and go into commercial services with Pepsi.

LD: What do you find most fulfilling about your work?

LL: It's definitely the people. I realized somewhere along the line that I wanted to be a lawyer because I get energy from people. At every stage of my career, I've had to make a pivot, or in many cases a save, because I fell on my butt and tripped over my shoelaces. But you get up again because of the energy of people.

"Craig, Abby and Jay are precisely the kind of top-tier litigators our clients seek, and their arrival underscores the momentum of our Complex Litigation practice," said Global Managing Partner Sherrese Smith. “Their arrival further strengthens our ability to represent companies in consumer class actions and mass arbitrations, allowing us to continue to gain share at the top of the market.”

"Joining Paul Hastings allows Abby, Jay and I to pair our experience with the powerful litigation platform the firm has built,” said Cardon. “Our practices complement Paul Hastings’ existing strengths, and the firm’s broad platform will provide the reach and resources to serve clients on their most significant matters.”

Cardon represents retailers, brands, adtech companies and technology platforms in class actions, mass arbitrations, and governmental investigations and enforcement proceedings primarily related to data usage, privacy and false advertising. He also advises clients on regulatory compliance, including advertising review for some of the country’s largest retailers and consumer product manufacturers. Cardon has developed a leading mass arbitration practice, representing businesses facing coordinated arbitration filings from tens of thousands of claimants seeking to leverage asymmetrical arbitration expenses. He has also defended FTC advertising enforcement actions through trial and regularly appears before the National Advertising Division.

Meyer specializes in consumer class action defense for food, beverage, retail, cosmetics and consumer goods companies, with a particular focus on product labeling, advertising and marketing claims. She has a strong track record working on “natural,” “Made in USA,” sustainability, slack-fill, contamination, pricing and health-halo claims. Meyer also counsels clients on compliance issues, including FDA regulations, FTC requirements and marketing claims, and California marketing requirements. She handles all aspects of litigation, from early resolution through filing, trial and appeal, in state and federal courts and arbitration.

Ramsey is an experienced litigator and trial attorney. He advises clients on complex business litigation and consumer class actions. He has defended clients in class actions and mass arbitrations involving false advertising, false discounts, product liability, warranty, privacy and data breach claims. He counsels an array of clients, including major retailers, brands, product manufacturers, lead generators, advertising networks, food and beverage companies, insurers, health plans, hospitals, airlines and telecommunications companies. Ramsey also advises clients on marketing, advertising, pricing, privacy and related e-commerce matters.

Cardon, Meyer and Ramsey count as clients Burberry, Coach, Lanvin Group, Lenovo, Levi Strauss, Nordstrom, Patagonia, Sephora, TJ Maxx, Vital Farms, Weight Watchers and Williams-Sonoma, among other companies.

The law is concrete. Deals etched with binding ink; rules laid out in black and white, written and followed by the most public of figures.

“Ghostwriting,” by its name, seems much more ephemeral. And in a way, ghostwriter Tim Cooke – known as “Cooke the Book” – is bit of a mythical figure. He will spend six months with a lawyer, a CEO, a surgeon, learning about their lives and getting inside their heads. He takes on a new reality and a new voice for a time, like a kind of shapeshifter. He helps his clients find their story and brings it to the page. Task completed, he disappears like Mary Poppins when the wind changes.

But in reality, his work is just as concrete as even the most cut-and-dry business deal.

Cooke, a member of the Lawdragon 100 Global Leaders in Legal Strategy & Consulting, has worked with leading business minds; he knows what they value, what they need, and what their goals are. His role is to help a client share their ideas in a way that cements them as a leader in their practice area. And he knows the way to do it.

“They're not paying me to be a yes man. I'm here to say, ‘You're paying me for my expertise, and this is what I think,’” Cooke says. “They can overrule me, but they're paying me to push back.”

That expertise is hard-earned. Before stepping into the world of ghostwriting, Cooke spent more than 30 years in the publishing industry. Fifteen of those were in the school and library market, helping convince reluctant readers to learn history, the arts, and even the hard sciences through the power of storytelling. In all, he’s written more than 350 books in his career.

That power has translated well to the business world. “As an author of six business books, I can say Tim is easily the best writer I’ve ever worked with,” says Cameron Herold, known as “the CEO Whisperer.”

In the legal industry, UK-based Cooke understands the system on both sides of the pond. He’s worked on books for a UK solicitor and for two Texas lawyers, including one of the leading plaintiffs' lawyers in the country. He’s flown to small towns in the U.S. to meet with clients or see their hometowns, to talk face-to-face and understand where they come from. That’s something, he emphasizes, AI can’t do.

The ROI here is perhaps less tangible than a standard business expense. But, Cooke says, telling a story is an investment all the same. He says of one legal client: “He’s likely not going to get a $60M case from writing his book, but he is going to make sure that if anyone is talking about complex financial litigation, they’re going to mention his name.”

Lawdragon: What do you enjoy about working with lawyers?

Tim Cooke: They think a lot about what they do; they think about the nature of the law. One plaintiffs’ lawyer I worked with said that if you're in a position where the government isn't going to go after these wrongdoers – the people who steal millions, corporate criminals – then it falls to the lawyers. Being a defender of the social fabric interests me.

A lot of lawyers, of course, are exceptional storytellers. They have to be to put their cases together. They tend to be good communicators, and they spend a lot of time with people who are at a very low ebb in their lives. And that gives a lot of lawyers a psychological edge; they understand people very, very well. This all comes together in a fantastic way with my skill, which is sustaining a narrative across the full length of a book. A book gives a lawyer a chance to say, "I've done remarkable things, met remarkable people, and this is what I think about my area of law, or this is what I think the younger me should have known.”

LD: Why else should lawyers write a book – both in terms of ROI, but also the less tangible benefits?

TC: I think the ROI is very simple. You establish yourself as a name in the space, a name that's somewhat above and beyond day-to-day practice. There are so many areas of law where a book would give people a chance to make their name better known and get a higher profile, more invitations to appear on podcasts or on radio, more occasions to speak to students or professionals. A book gives a lawyer an angle. It’s a calling card, a springboard, a celebration, all in one.

Another reason I think lawyers might like to write books is that people love to read about the law, especially while the law is changing so quickly. Pioneering female and diverse lawyers might want to tell their stories to help those who are coming behind them; we're still only a couple of generations into diversity being completely accepted. Some lawyers might want their practice areas to be better known, or might want to lead the conversation about legal training, the impact of AI, Big Law, lawyer mental health. These are things that lawyers can get ahead of and set themselves up as a spokesperson, if they want to help steer the debate.

A book gives a lawyer an angle. It’s a calling card, a springboard, a celebration, all in one.

There's always a chance that a book will be a bestseller … but that’s typically a long shot. This is not Harry Potter. So the ROI comes from reputation, profile and opportunity. It comes from leaving a legacy for your family or your partner or your law firm that says, "Look, I've had this fantastic life. I've done some great things. Here’s what I learned, or here are some of my cases that really mattered." In my experience, everyone has won cases that no one thought they would win.

LD: You mentioned that lawyers are good storytellers. But how does that translate to sharing about their own stories? What is that process like, and what can they learn from working with you to bring into the courtroom?

TC: The classic thing with lawyers is they don't know what they know. The things they say seem perfectly reasonable to them because they live in a world where everybody talks the same way. And it's me who has to say, "Well, no, whoa, whoa, hold on. What did you just say?"

A lot of what I do is playing the useful idiot. I listen to stories that don’t seem important and ask, "Oh, okay, so what?” But every now and then I say, "Jeez, why didn't you start with that? That's the story.”

An awful lot of people, not just lawyers, come to me thinking they know what their story is but the story often looks completely different from the outside. What they think is a story of overcoming adversity, say, is actually a love story because they founded a practice with their partner. When I worked with a plaintiffs' lawyer, I recognized that many of the stories he had revolved around his hatred of corporate bullies, so that was a way in to his book.

As for what they might learn to bring into the courtroom, I guess that might be around looking for stories behind the main story and recognizing patterns that can carry a reader across a whole narrative arc. These are skills many lawyers already have, just on a deeper or more extended level.

There’s a difference in scale. In court, you're convincing a judge or a jury, but if you can write a book and convince three, four, five thousand people that what you think about this aspect of divorce law is right, then maybe you can get a bit of momentum and help change things.

LD: That's beautiful. You mentioned AI, so let's talk about it. Tell me what you say to a lawyer, or any client who says, "Well, I don't need you to write a book. I can do it myself with ChatGPT."

TC: I would tell them exactly what I told the client who said that to me. "Okay, off you go. I'll believe it when I see it.”

I'm very sanguine about this. AI can write a draft for a legal matter fine. If you want a car manual, it can do that. It can write a recipe or a guidebook. But it cannot capture nuance, and particularly not human feeling. It reads like it was written by a machine. A smart machine, but a machine all the same. If I was a lawyer, part of my reason for wanting to write a book would be to step out from behind the legal process and speak in my own voice, so I would want my book to sound like me and not like a machine. In addition, AI can only scrape content from existing material. So if a lawyer has done anything that's novel or unique, they have to write that themselves.

If you can write a book and convince three, four, five thousand people that what you think about this aspect of divorce law is right, then maybe you can get a bit of momentum and help change things.

Of course, when I say they have to write it themselves, they're not going to have to write it themselves. I can write it. I take the legwork out of the process.

At the start of a project I ask them, "What do you want to get out of this book? What have you got to say?" I have them imagine a reader, a specific person who we give a name. That way, when we talk I can say, "Listen, this is all very interesting. The environmental law has changed in the state of Kansas. I get that. But let’s go back to Fiona, our 35-year-hotshot rising through the court system. Why does she give two hoots about what's going on with this? Tell me the lesson here." Again, I don't think AI can do that. I don't think it can push back. I don’t think it can do humor. I don't think it can do personality.

Once a book is rolling, I can talk to an author anywhere. They can be in the gym, they can be in their car, they can be going for a walk or sitting in an airport lounge. They don't need to find the time to write or even to prep for the call. I show up with questions ready to get them talking.

After that, I get into the writing. Writing is what I do; it’s my USP. I can write them any book they want in any style they want. I can write it for them in blank verse if they want it. I'm not as cheap as AI, but I'm easier to use than AI and the outcome sounds more like the author. Ghostwriters joke that we make you sound like you, only better.

LD: Tell me more about that process of finding out the story. How do you find a story people don't know they want to be telling?

TC: That’s really a question of listening very carefully, thinking very hard, and having gone through this process nearly 40 times, which makes me highly sensitive to picking up on nuance. Sometimes when people get radial with their thinking, you get to things that are a bit more interesting and that loop back to something else. It's amazing the number of times that there are these hidden stories, or just a different angle on something.

LD: That the author does not think of as being significant.

TC: Precisely. Then, once you have the story, you have to figure out how best to tell it so that people will read it. If no one reads your book, you might as well not have written it. This is a big difference between a lawyer’s day job and writing a book. Most people who read a legal draft are reading it because they have to read it. It’s their job. If it's 20 pages long, they have to read 20 pages. A 150-page book, no one in the world has to read that. So you cannot write a 150-page book the same way you would write a brief that someone is being paid to read. You need to be a lot more aware, not only of the overall narrative arc, but of the smaller story structures inside it that will keep people moving from one page to the next page to the next.

LD: Tell me about the process of taking on a client’s voice – how do you get inside someone's head to be able to speak like them and tell a story like them?

TC: Well, number one, again, listening. Number two, you must be very good at letting go of your ego. You soon learn who uses what words and what their mannerisms are and whether they're a one-syllable person or a two-syllable person, whether they use longer sentences, whether they're more concrete, whether they're more abstract, and so on. You have to take on the personality of the person that you're talking to. A ghostwriter is an actor playing the role of their author.

AI can write a draft for a legal matter fine. ... But it cannot capture nuance, and particularly not human feeling.

LD: Is there a story from someone in the legal profession that you want to tell?

TC: I particularly love stories about people who fight against injustice. I like stories of little people winning against the big people, or stories of smart people who manage to make the legal system work despite itself.

I also love stories of people who “shouldn't” be lawyers, who came from places or families where everything was against them. There are so many stories of people not quite fitting in, but either carrying on or setting up on their own practice – a lot of stories of people who have been told they can't do it, they can't do it, they can't do it. And then they do it.

LD: Absolutely. You know, you said on LinkedIn, “Don't hire a ghostwriter who finds writing easy; hire one who finds writing hard.” What does working through that “hard” look like, and what does it yield?

TC: Anyone can write something that's okay. Writing something that's very good is quite difficult. I'm not a great believer in sitting around waiting for the right word to come. Get something down on paper. A first draft is just a draft. It’s meant to be crap, so you’ll have to revise it. But if there’s still something wrong with what you’ve written, the biggest crime that I think a writer can commit is to think, "Oh, well, it’s fine. No one will notice." Someone will notice, so you've got to change it.

If you can see how to make it better, you keep changing it until you think it’s good enough. You can't achieve perfection, but someone is paying you and trusting you with their story. If the words are wrong, then next day you go back and write it better. You carry on like that until the book's done.

That's where the experience comes in. It's very easy when you've written as many books as I've written to get very blasé about it. I remember when I first had my first piece of writing printed in a professional book, which was in a Time Life book from a big 20-volume history of the world, I got in my car and I drove down the motorway 200 miles to show my mother. These days, I barely even bother to look at a copy. But being blasé about the books is one thing – you must never get blasé about the writing.

Some authors come back and write a second book or a third book together, and they also refer me, so I want them to tell people that I'm really good. I'm lucky I'm a good writer, but I’m good because I’ve worked hard for decades to be this good. I take it deadly seriously. You've got to sweat the small stuff because the words matter. They are the only thing I've got to sell. Does that make me sound very mercenary?

LD: No, but it's true. Words are what you have. To that end, what do lawyers, or any clients, tend to misunderstand about ghostwriting – whether that's what you do, the process, the time?

TC: Well, they can get frustrated by the timeline. But the timeline isn't just me; the whole publishing industry is much slower than outsiders usually realize. I probably take about six months to write a book with somebody, which includes gathering the material, then writing the book and revising it together. If the author wants to self-publish, that can happen quite quickly. If they want to use a hybrid publisher, which is where you pay for the services of a professional publishing company, that could be another six to 12 months. That’s the route most of my authors take. If they want to go to a traditional publisher and try so get a contract, they could be looking at two years. So producing the manuscript takes about six months, but the manuscript is just the start of the publishing process, not the end of it.

I also think some people still have this feeling that using a ghostwriter is somehow “cheating,” that they should write their book themselves. I think that’s a very outdated view now. Books are such a staple for lawyers, doctors, CEOs, all sorts of professionals who don’t have the time to learn how to write them. More than half of all nonfiction bestsellers are now ghostwritten. Think about it. You don't do your own car mechanics. You pay an expert to do it. You pay a shrink. You pay a trainer in the gym. You pay a business coach. So you pay an expert to write your book.

Most of my clients are happy to acknowledge my role, and those who aren’t don’t have to. They are the author while I’m just the writer. Ultimately, I'm just writing their ideas down using the professional skill I’ve honed over decades. The content is theirs, so the book is theirs...and the credit is theirs.

LD: Right, it’s their story.

TC: Yes. And when it’s all done, I disappear as if I was never there. I’m like the shoemaker's elf. I'm not there in the morning when you wake up.

Tim Cooke can be reached by email at tim@cookethebook.com.

The trial bar is where American law performs, and the deal table is where it builds.

These are its architects.

In Glengarry Glen Ross, Alec Baldwin’s Blake strides into a room of salesmen and chalks up the only rule that matters:

“A-B-C. Always be closing.”

He was selling real estate leads of doubtful quality. The lawyers in this guide close the transactions that remake industries, redraw markets and move trillions of dollars of value – and they do it with rather better manners. In a year in which AI infrastructure, sovereign wealth, take-privates and the return of the megadeal have kept boardrooms busy well past midnight, they have rarely been more in demand.

The guide spans the full sweep of transactional excellence: M&A and private equity, capital markets and finance, governance and shareholder activism, and the tax, antitrust and regulatory specialists without whom no significant deal gets done. As always, you can sort the honorees by ‘practice’ to find the ‘500’ in each.

Ethan Klingsberg is co-head of U.S. corporate and M&A at Freshfields in New York, and the lawyer Google turns to when the stakes are highest. He advised on its $32B acquisition of Wiz, the largest deal in the company’s history, which closed in March after a year of regulatory scrutiny across several continents – following Mandiant, Looker, Waze and Motorola Mobility before it. This year he also led the team advising the Mubadala-led consortium on the $6.2B take-private of Clear Channel Outdoor, and advised CPP Investments on its acquisition of NASDAQ-listed ReNew Energy Global, a deal carrying an enterprise value of around $10.2B. A Yale Law graduate, he spent 25 years at Cleary before leading a four-partner move to Freshfields in 2019 – a hire that signaled the Magic Circle firm’s serious intent on Wall Street. 

Alex Kelly is global co-chair of the M&A and private equity practice at Latham & Watkins, which puts her in charge of keeping one of the busiest deal machines in the world at the top of the league tables. An NYU Law graduate who first walked through Latham’s doors as a summer associate, she has built her entire career at the firm. She also leads Latham’s asset management M&A practice, advising the managers who are reshaping private capital – among them Ares, Sixth Street, PIMCO and Hunter Point Capital, for whom she has handled a run of GP stake transactions. This month she is advising Hg on the $5.1B sale of fund administrator Gen II Fund Services to KKR. She has also been a clear-eyed voice on the AI and data center megadeals now dominating the pipeline, arguing that only firms with genuine global scale are equipped to handle them.

Karen Hsu Kelley heads the Public Company Advisory Practice at Simpson Thacher in New York. If the dealmakers in this guide get companies to the altar, Kelley makes sure the marriage works. Her team of more than 20 dedicated lawyers acts as the right hand to in-house legal departments at over 60 public companies, from Dow 30, Fortune 100 and S&P 500 names to newly listed issuers, with clients including Blackstone, Caterpillar, Kyndryl and Cushman & Wakefield. She advises boards and management on SEC disclosure, executive compensation, director independence, shareholder proposals, proxy advisors and crisis planning – the governance machinery that underpins every IPO, spin-off and transformative deal. 

This is our 7th edition of this guide. It has grown to 1,284 standout lawyers. For those who follow our guides, there are just two remaining in the year: our inaugural London 100 and 100 Legal Journalists. We are excited that next year we will offer dedicated guides in our collection on Private Equity & Funds; Banking, Finance & Capital Markets; Tax; and Real Estate. 

Our selection of honorees for this guide come from nominations, research and peer review. Attorneys denoted with an asterisk are members of our esteemed Hall of Fame. 

Contributing to D'Aloia's legal success are his comprehensive investigations that uncover confidential witnesses whose testimony helps overcome the increasingly high barriers imposed by the law and courts.

A New Jersey native, D’Aloia earned a B.S. in economics from Rutgers University and received his J.D. from Fordham University School of Law, where he was editor-in-chief of the Fordham International Law Journal. 

Lawdragon: Before joining Pomerantz, you were on the defense side of securities cases, right?

Justin D’Aloia: Yes, that’s right. I spent 10 or 11 years at Weil, Gotshal & Manges. I started as an associate, I was promoted to counsel, and I eventually made the jump to Pomerantz in 2022.

LD: What did you think about your time at Weil?

JD: I had a great experience at Weil and learned a tremendous amount there. We essentially litigated cases through trial so I learned about all stages of litigation, and effective strategies to use at each stage, during my time there. 

On the defense side, even as a senior associate or counsel or partner, you're still working under two or three layers of more senior attorneys. When you have large class actions with clients that big, they want the most senior lawyers going into the courtroom and arguing. I just wanted to do a little more myself.

I thought doing plaintiffs’ work would not only allow me to spend more time in court, but also give me the ability to flex my creative muscle more. On the plaintiff side you get to define the course of litigation, instead of responding to plaintiffs’ claims, as you do on the defense side.

LD: What made you choose Pomerantz?

JD: Pomerantz is a name brand in the business, and so we came across them all the time.

I met with Jeremy [Lieberman], the managing partner here, with whom I was immediately impressed. I spoke to some of my colleagues at Weil, including a senior partner there who had a large, multi-year class action against Jeremy, and who sang his praises. So I knew that, between that recommendation and my own gut feeling, it was the right decision.

LD: Can you tell me about the Danaher case?

JD: Danaher owns 15 or 20 businesses. In recent years, it has shifted its focus to businesses that operate in the life-sciences space.

One group of companies, known as its “bioprocessing business,” manufactured the equipment that pharmaceutical companies used to make drugs. And that business experienced a “Covid bump,” for lack of a better word, during the peak of the pandemic when everyone was searching for a vaccine.

As the pandemic subsided in 2022 and 2023, the executives kept assuring investors that the bioprocessing business is thriving, we don’t see any change in customer sentiment, and we’re going to do even better than we’ve done in past years. 

The CEO got on the call and said that he “made up the projections” that he just gave on the public earnings call.

LD: Was that true?

JD: In reality, things were kind of unravelling behind the scenes due to a confluence of factors. The most significant fact, which we included in our complaint, came from our investigation. We spoke with a former employee who was asked by an executive to sit in on an executive call immediately after the public investor-facing earnings call because the executive was out on maternity leave.

No one else on the call knew that this lower-level employee was sitting in for this executive. And, according to this witness, the CEO got on the call and said that he “made up the projections” that he just gave on the public earnings call because he didn’t like the ones he got from management.

LD: That’s a pretty big deal.

JD: That’s just classic securities fraud, right? It’s like an admission that what I said was made up and false. That is a form of evidence you so rarely see in fraud cases. So, I think that was really compelling and persuaded the court that this was a meaningful case.

LD: How did you ever find that witness?

JD: I think it would be fair to call them a whistleblower, but they didn’t exactly come forward or reach out to us. We found them through raw investigative work. We have an investigative team; they’re former investigators from 60 Minutes and a number of other major news and media publications. 

They identified the former employee who had these explosive allegations. I thought the allegations were so important that we went back and verified them with the witness. I found their account to be very credible, and so, we decided to move forward with it.

LD: Did finding that witness make the case a slam dunk?

JD: Since the late ‘90s, the bar for alleging securities fraud claims has become so high. It’s subject to heightened pleading standards. Finding former employees who can provide non-public information in order to buttress claims is almost standard process. But this one was really powerful. 

LD: Can you tell me more about the bar you had to overcome?

JD: A lot of the statements at issue in our case involved projections about what the company anticipated in future periods. Those are not only subject to heightened pleading standards, they are also potentially subject to a “safe harbor” in the federal securities laws, which basically protect forward-looking statements unless they meet very onerous exceptions. So we spent a considerable amount of time researching the law on that issue, and framed the claims accordingly.

LD: Did other firms make claims against Danaher?

JD: Because of the difficulties I just mentioned, especially those relating to forward-looking statements, no other plaintiffs came forward to be selected as lead plaintiff and no other law firms moved to be selected as lead counsel on behalf of any plaintiff.

We were the only firm that was willing to roll up our sleeves, put in the work, and take this case on.

LD: What did you do to overcome those issues? 

JD: As you can probably imagine from casual conversation, many statements that talk about prospective events may contain parts that speak about the future and parts that speak about the present, so you really have to go through the defendants’ statements and pull out what’s forward-looking and what’s present tense. We took care in our court papers to carefully explain the law on this topic and dissect the statements at issue.

The court took a close look at the statements we claimed were misleading and agreed with us that many of them contained discrete representations about present demand. So, even if, hypothetically, the forward-looking aspects of those statements may be protected by safe harbor, those describing current demand were not protected.

The court also found that we met the exceptions for safe harbor for the forward-looking statements that the CEO made on the public call right before the internal call where he scolded managers for submitting unfavorable forecasts.

LD: That was a major ruling. How significant was the settlement that resulted?

JD: The settlement was for $172.5 million, which is the largest-ever securities fraud recovery in the D.C. Circuit. 

We were the only firm that was willing to roll up our sleeves, put in the work, and take this case on.

It’s especially significant for investors because Danaher isn’t just a startup company with a small group of speculative investors. This was an established, well-known, widely held company, whose stock was owned by some of the biggest index funds and other institutional clients that people around the country rely on through their retirement funds and other investments. And so, this settlement is something that has an important impact for people nationwide.

It really speaks volumes about the risks we took in tackling a matter with such challenges. And it’s nice to be rewarded for taking on such a challenging case.

LD: You’re involved in cases dealing with the health dangers from lead-sheathed copper telephone cables against AT&T and Lumen. Where do they stand?

JD: They’re both ongoing, but they’re in very different procedural postures.

Lumen was initially dismissed by the district court with prejudice, but without any explanation for why it was dismissed with prejudice.

We appealed to the 5th Circuit, and the 5th Circuit agreed to send it back to the district court. So, we are continue to litigate in the district court, and filed a new amended complaint. We’re briefing another motion to dismiss in that case.

LD: How about the AT&T case?

JD: AT&T is a little different in that AT&T’s predecessor was the ultimate source of all these lead-lined cables throughout the country.

Once AT&T decided to abandon these cables as they switched over to fiber, the cables were just sitting there, indefinitely, decaying away under changing environmental conditions.

LD: What danger do these cables cause?

JD: Everyone knows lead is toxic. Everyone signs lead paint disclosures when they buy or sell a house. It’s common knowledge. We said in our initial complaints that the executives formed a plan to reclaim copper cables for their salvage value when they decided to switch over to fiber. But, when they did so, they left all the lead-covered ones in place.

LD: The case was almost dismissed, right?

JD: The court sustained about 25 of the misstatements by AT&T that we challenged in our initial pleading, but it said that the allegation of scienter was borderline. The judge dismissed it without prejudice but granted us permission to re-plead with additional facts to get it over the line. 

We filed an amended complaint soon after, but we continued to investigate to see if there was anything else out there that we missed. We knew a decision must have been made consciously to leave the lead cables behind and reclaim all others.

LD: What did you find?

JD: We came across several former employees who gave us compelling new information. Among other things, we learned that there were reports that were sent out to every executive on the team, up to and including the CEO.

And those reports literally said, to the precise metric, how much lead cable was left in place instead of being reclaimed.

That was the smoking gun that we were looking for. It corroborated the inference that we initially made when we filed the first complaint.

LD: What did you do with that?

JD: We filed a third amended complaint in response to the motion to dismiss, which is technically allowed under the federal rules.

That was the smoking gun that we were looking for. It corroborated the inference that we initially made when we filed the first complaint.

Rather than address the allegations, AT&T moved to strike the new complaint. There was a slew of emergency motions and, ultimately, just a few months ago, the court issued a decision granting us leave to file that third amended complaint and denying the defendants’ pending motion to dismiss as moot.

Defendants filed a motion to dismiss. We’ll see where that goes, but I think it’s a very promising case.

LD: What can you tell me about the consolidated securities fraud class action against B. Riley Financial?

JD: That’s a fascinating case and has an interesting backstory on a personal level.

I was in California when one of my partners asked if I could attend a lead plaintiff hearing for him. That’s the court hearing where different law firms argue in favor of their client being appointed lead plaintiff, meaning they will then be lead counsel. So, I said sure. And after I agreed, he tells me it’s a contested hearing, and there are four others vying for lead plaintiff applications.

I went to the hearing and argued for our client. Ultimately, our client was selected as the lead plaintiff. And, of course, I was assigned the case once we received that decision.

LD: What is the case about?

JD: This is also a classic case of securities fraud in that there was an extreme concentration of investments by an investment bank with one particular client that was never disclosed. In fact, what was disclosed publicly was that the investments were diversified, when in reality a significant amount of the investment bank’s own balance sheet was exposed with this one person.

And it turns out this person was at the center of a massive $400M fraud that led to the collapse of a hedge fund. He was also the CEO of a company that B. Riley was heavily invested in. 

When he was convicted of fraud, that impacted the company that he ran, which, in turn, impacted B. Riley’s equity position in those companies. This has completely decimated its balance sheet. The stock went from a high of about $50 down to $2. So, this is a fascinating securities fraud case, and it was very fortuitous the way I became involved in it, but I’m really glad that I am leading the charge now.

LD: Any other cases we should keep an eye on?

JD: The one I would mention is a case against an AI company called SoundHound in the Northern District of California. AI is everywhere these days and we’re just about to enter discovery.

Speaking of AI, it recently became a contested issue in the Danaher case.

LD: How did that happen?

JD: When we file our motions to approve the settlement and approve our application for attorney’s fees and expenses, like we do in every case where we reach a settlement, usually everyone says, “Great job, thanks for getting us a recovery.” But we got an objection in the Danaher case. 

We started doing some research and we saw that the person who filed the objection filed almost identical objections in three or four other recent securities cases. That raised an eyebrow, so we took a closer look at what the objection said, and two things struck us:

One, they didn’t read like a human wrote them. They were replete with bullet points and equivocal statements, like classic AI.

Two, in every single one of the cases where this individual filed objections, they bought and sold all their shares within a day and asked for an “award” for filing the objections. In other words, they weren’t impacted by the alleged fraud, so they’re not even a member of this class, but they’re filing these frivolous objections to receive a quick payout. 

We ran an analysis with an AI detection tool, and it turns out that all the objections this individual submitted recently were generated by AI to a 100 percent probability of certainty. In contrast, our responding papers generated a 0 percent probability of being generated by AI.

LD: Had you seen anything like that before?

JD: Usually, we’re dealing with large defense firms, some of the best in the country. And I’m sure they have their own AI tools, but I’m also fairly certain that they vet anything before they submit it to the court.

These were just completely unadorned generative AI briefs. We obviously responded to them, but they were just riddled with errors. Unfortunately, I think it’s a sign of what’s to come.

We have changed our nominations process. Our prior portal has been replaced by a new, more detailed nomination form. 

Lawdragon has created a unique recognition for global lawyers and professionals on a platform that supports your practice with high-performing content and among the most trusted guides in the legal industry.

From our initial Lawdragon 500 Leading Lawyers in America, founded in 2005, we now publish a collection of 47 guides to the world’s leading lawyers and legal professionals.

We have built Lawdragon on our belief in the power of intelligence, stories, research and digital innovation. We have recognized more than 30,000 legal professionals from more than 10,000 law firms and businesses. Each of those honorees has been selected on their merits identified through our independent research or submissions.

With the growing awareness of the role high-quality recognitions now play in the legal market, we have expanded our guides, and now the infrastructure to support it.

We are now proud to offer:

• An improved, more robust nomination portal. This ensures all nominees are treated equally and required to provide the same information.
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