Benchmark Litigation

Pennsylvania

Review

Dispute resolution
Blank Rome

With 15 offices (14 throughout the US and one in Shanghai, China) the practitioners of Blank Rome are revered most notably for their activity in the insurance recovery space. The crown jewel of the firm, the insurance team takes on cutting-edge matters on behalf of leading corporations and institutions, distinguishing itself from its peers by providing counsel exclusively to policyholders. Members of the insurance group are acclaimed by clients for the breadth of their expertise in, among other matters, complex insurance litigation and disputes arising from manuscript policies, and are additionally recognized as “responsive and providing sound advice.” Clients go on to praise Blank Rome’s insurance specialists for being “abreast of the latest commercial developments.” 

     While policyholder-side insurance work may be what the firm is most celebrated for, it is making strides in other areas as well; its New York office recently benefitted from the recruitment of Craig Weiner and Lisa Coyle, two all-purpose commercial litigators who joined Blank Rome in the spring of 2023. 

     The firm, and particularly DC-based future star Omid Safa, scored big in September 2022 when the Safa-led firm team secured a favorable jury verdict in favor of asset-based lender CIT Group/Equipment Financing in an aviation insurance case involving a complex dispute over coverage for multimillion-dollar losses resulting from the confiscation of an aircraft by Brazilian tax authorities. The jury found that CIT had met its burden to establish coverage for the confiscation of an aircraft by the Brazilian government. As a result, CIT will be awarded the full amount of its multimillion-dollar damages claims (which were established on summary judgment) and statutory interest. The current value of the award is $5 million. DC-based co-chair James Murray wins praise for the deep insurance knowledge that he makes available to leaders in corporations, government entities, and religious institutions, among others, in their most sensitive and critical matters – often pertaining to sexual abuse liability and COVID-related coverage claims. Murray serves as court-appointed special insurance counsel to the debtors in two Catholic organization bankruptcies that were successfully confirmed in 2022. 

     Murray is additionally working alongside his fellow insurance recovery co-chair, Los Angeles-based Linda Kornfeld, who continues to demonstrate her recovery prowess and maintains the position of being among the firm’s most active and capable practitioners. Kornfeld and Murray were recently heavily involved in the COVID-19 business interruption space, leading more than a dozen recovery actions – each seeking hundreds of millions of dollars. In one such matter, this Blank Rome duo also represents the NFL’s Philadelphia Eagles against FM Insurance in litigation involving the Eagles’ $1 billion property and business-interruption policy. Murray and Kornfeld are helping the Eagles recover their COVID-19 losses stemming from their inability to use their stadium for the 2020 football season, as well as for star-studded 2020 summer concerts and major soccer and lacrosse events as a result of the pandemic. DC-based co-chair John Gibbons meanwhile acts with Safa on behalf of Nooter in connection with the enforcement and recovery of insurance proceeds for Nooter. They are now engaged in two competing actions in Missouri courts. Nooter enforced its right to insurance defense and indemnity in connection with asbestos bodily injury suits filed against the company. Nooter fully litigated declaratory judgment rights under excess insurance policies, and the Missouri state courts issued controlling judgments for those policies. In January 2023, Evanston Insurance Company initiated a suit in an effort to “dump limits” by “tendering” limits of liability unconnected to actual claims to evade its defense obligations. Nooter has moved to dismiss the suit, which violates existing judgments. 

Kessler Topaz Meltzer & Check

Based in the Philadelphia suburb of Radnor, Pennsylvania, plaintiff heavyweights Kessler Topaz Meltzer & Check have scored nationwide wins in the class-actions sphere. Clients voice appreciation for its partners being “well prepared in analysis of cases,” and “keeping the client informed.” While domiciled in suburban Pennsylvania, the firm’s ambitions have taken it global. “Kessler Topaz has a lot of penetration in the European market. They spent a lot of money on that, and it has paid off. They realized that there was a space in Europe where they did not know there was a class-action market at all, and so they built a monitoring practice with them. This has grown to the point where they are representing institutional investors in the US as well.”

In a recent example of the rewards of the firm’s overseas entrepreneurialism, Kessler Topaz scored a major win in February 2022, when a $1.6 billion global settlement became effective with Steinhoff International Holdings, Steinhoff auditor Deloitte & Touche South Africa, and Steinhoff’s former directors and officers and their D&O insurers. The settlement is purportedly the largest securities settlement outside the US to date. It resolves claims brought by Steinhoff common stock shareholders before courts in the Netherlands, Germany, and South Africa for losses they sustained as a result of Steinhoff’s December 2017 revelation that it had discovered accounting irregularities and that it had overstated profits by $7.4 billion between 2009 and 2017. Kessler Topaz, representing more than 40 institutional investors from around the globe, initially filed legal action in the Netherlands, seeking recovery of investor losses and a judicial examination.

Stuart Berman is particularly noted for his non-US litigation practice, as is Darren Check. The latter is praised by a client as “very knowledgeable and informative” and someone who “always keeps his clients up to date on the status of cases.”

While the firm has been primarily lauded for its securities practice, an area in which it has scored some of its most noteworthy victories, there has been a push toward antitrust cases as of late. In one example, Joseph Meltzer represents a class of plaintiffs who filed a Consolidated Class Action Complaint against pharmaceuticals entity Amarin, alleging that, having pursued and lost patent infringement litigation against would-be generic competitors as well as exhausting every regulatory means to prevent and delay the launch of generic competitors, Amarin adopted an unlawful strategy to artificially extend its monopoly for its sole product, Vascepa. By locking up every viable supplier of the key ingredient needed to manufacture generic Vascepa, Amarin boxed generic manufacturers out of the market. This scheme left Amarin free to continue charging supracompetitive prices and obtain the most profit it could out of Vascepa, at the expense of the plaintiffs and other purchasers of the drug. In another “antitrust-adjacent” matter, Meltzer and Check represent a class of plaintiffs, New Jersey municipalities, who filed a complaint against video programming and cable entities Netflix and Hulu, alleging that the defendants were required to file an application for individual certificates of approval or a system-wide franchise, in accordance with a New Jersey state statute, and failed to do so – and thus are providing cable television services throughout New Jersey without authorization and in contravention of the New Jersey Cable Television Act. Such certificates of approval and/or franchise would have authorized the defendants to use public rights-of-way to provide their cable television service and video programming, provided that defendants make payments to each municipality in which it provides service. The required payment is equal to a percentage of the gross revenues derived from subscription fees paid by subscribers in each municipality. The plaintiffs seek to require the defendants to abide by the CTA and pay what they owe to New Jersey municipalities.

Saul Ewing

With a legal footprint spanning over 16 offices in numerous jurisdictions around the country, including New York, Chicago, DC, Baltimore, Minneapolis, Philadelphia, and West Palm Beach outfits, Saul Ewing’s litigation team is equipped with an arsenal of diverse practice specializations. Among the most notable and active of the firm’s area specializations are its commercial, higher education, real estate, and white collar practices.

     Among the firm’s most exalted is litigation chair Cathleen Devlin of Saul Ewing’s Philadelphia office, who emphasizes in her practice complex environmental, commercial contract, and business tort litigation. Devlin currently serves alongside environmental civil litigation and appellate chair John Stoviak as lead counsel to Cyprus Amax Minerals Company in environmental litigation against TCI Pacific Communications regarding Cyprus’s pursuit of more than $14 million of recovery from TCI. The matter arises in connection with Cyprus’s environmental investigation and remediation as to arsenic, cadmium, and lead soil contamination allegedly attributable to 20th century zinc smelting operations in Oklahoma. Following Devlin and Stoviak’s obtainment of an alter ego summary judgement ruling entitling Cyprus to CERCLA contribution from TCI and a corresponding award of $14.2 million, a total which covers 45% of associated cleanup costs through 2017, TCI sought appeal of the ruling on the Tenth Circuit and was met with a complete affirmance. TCI currently seeks a Tenth Circuit rehearing.

     On the higher education front, the fount of the firm’s acuity is largely indexable to Joseph O’Dea, Jr. of Chicago; Wilmington, Delaware-based litigation vice chair and co-chair of the higher education practice group James Taylor, Jr.; and, also serving as co-chair of higher education in addition to co-chair of the K-12 schools practice, Chicago’s James Keller. Whereas O’Dea continues in the critical role of counsel for Pennsylvania State University in all litigation regarding the Jerry Sandusky sexual abuse scandal, Keller is active in the role of counsel to Pennsylvania College of Technology (PCT) in a bellwether class action filed against PCT wherein plaintiffs seek partial tuition reimbursement as a result of the transition to online learning following the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. The matter will address novel and salient questions as to the contractual obligations of an institution to its students and the legal approximations of remote education’s quality.

     Also hailing from the firm’s Chicago office, commercial litigator Amy Kline directs her focus on the representation of insurance and reinsurance companies, as well as institutions of higher education. Joined by Boston partner Joseph Lipchitz, Kline currently represents Merck & Co. in litigation filed against Bayer AG regarding Merck’s sale of the Dr. Scholl’s line of products to Bayer under a stock and asset purchase agreement (SAPA). The matter arises following Bayer’s refusal to honor the terms of the SAPA, which stipulate that certain product-related claims in connection with currently unfolding and highly public talcum powder liability actions would transition to Bayer’s purview in 2021 after a specified period during which they remained Merck’s responsibility. Following an attempt on Bayer’s part to dispel itself of liability, Merck retained the firm and filed suit in the Delaware Court of Chancery.

     At the firm’s Baltimore office, partners Jason St. John and Charles Monk, II are currently defending the Maryland State Board of Education against a landmark government and education class action brought by parents of City of Baltimore schoolchildren in an attempt to revive a suit dating back to the 1990s, regarding claims that the state’s allegedly inadequate levels of funding and vital resources constitute a violation under Article VIII of the State Constitution.

     In Boston, complex commercial litigators Lipchitz and Jeffrey Robbins recently defended Muslim civil rights advocate Lori Saroya in a defamation suit filed against Saroya by the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), of which she previously served as a member of the national board, in connection with Saroya’s censuring of CAIR’s purported conduct of negligence as to sexual harassment and discrimination. Lipchitz and Robbins were successful in obtaining CAIR’s unconditional withdrawal with prejudice from the suit following two hearings before a US Magistrate and another before the US District Court Judge presiding over the matter.