Case Profiles
Class Action/Mass Torts
The Group has advised a large number of clients and their legal teams in defending against class actions or mass tort assaults, usually on appeal.
In appeals cases, our approach is to condition the intellectual environment in which the case will ultimately be argued. We send sympathetic legal experts to talk to law schools, editorial boards and legal and business publications in the circuit where the case will be heard. We draft op-eds for these experts, targeted to newspapers and other journals in these jurisdictions as well as the national media. In addition to presenting independent voices talking about the issues in the case, we often introduce considerations that typically receive only glancing attention in legal briefs, such as the economic impact of a case.
In one instance involving a class action case against a non-U.S.-based multinational, a major U.S. newspaper ran an op-ed that we conceived and drafted for a prominent authority arguing that cases such as our client's were leading European investors to demand a risk premium for U.S. investments. We also helped arrange and develop Congressional testimony in support of our client's case. This is the kind of sophisticated message development and dissemination that is typical of the Group. In this case, the client won the appeal overwhelmingly. Their market capitalization jumped half a billion dollars on the news.
Case Profiles:
Click on any of the following major categories of WHWG assignments: