Cravath Swaine & Moore continues to set the standard for other major business law firms. Its elite status as one of the “white-shoe” firms is acknowledged by contemporaries on a coast-to-coast basis and always with tones of reverence. “The Cravath style” has been used as a descriptor for firms aspiring to the same level of pedigree. “Cravath partners just carry the prestige with them daily. I even encounter partners who used to be with Cravath, and they still have this polish about them,” opines a peer. “Then you find out they are a Cravath alum, and it all makes sense.” The firm’s client roster is equally as “enviable,” and its partners service these blue-chip entities across a wide array of disciplines, most notably antitrust, commercial matters, securities, white-collar crime and even intellectual property.
Cases concerning antitrust have been front-and-center as of late. “I feel like antitrust is the beating heart of Cravath right now,” speculates a peer. Lending further weight to this observation, the firm doubled down on this practice over the past year, hiring Andrew Finch, a seasoned authority in this area, from Paul Weiss. A team composed of
Karin DeMasi,
Christine Varney and Lauren Kennedy is representing the Blue Cross Blue Shield Association and more than a dozen member plans as lead counsel in consolidated multidistrict antitrust litigation pending in Alabama federal court challenging foundational aspects of the Blue Cross Blue Shield System as anticompetitive. In a matter traversing the intersection of antitrust and securities,
Antony Ryan and Yonaton Evensecured a favorable settlement for Qualcomm and certain of its directors and officers to resolve a consolidated class action stock-drop suit in California federal court filed in the wake of antitrust investigations and litigation concerning the company’s patent licensing and modem chipset businesses. Plaintiffs alleged that defendants made false and misleading statements and failed to disclose material information concerning alleged anticompetitive conduct by Qualcomm to maintain a monopoly for semiconductors used in mobile phones, specifically with respect to licensing its standard essential patents on a non-discriminatory basis and to the bundling of license and chipset sales agreements.
Michael Paskin and Helam Gebremariam
are representing Citigroup in putative class-action litigation brought by Loomis Sayles Trust in New York federal court concerning several large equity trades executed by Citigroup in March 2022. Specifically, the plaintiff alleges that Citigroup breached its obligations as its broker by failing to properly follow the customer’s trading instructions in connection with the trades, and that this failure resulted in significant financial loss for the plaintiff and members of the proposed class, which brought claims for breach of contract and breach of fiduciary duty, seeking compensation for alleged losses in excess of $70 million. The Cravath duo filed a motion for summary judgment in November 2023, which was granted in part in September 2024, denying plaintiff’s breach of fiduciary claim but allowing the contract claim to proceed to trial, pending the court’s ruling on motion for class certification, which was filed in October 2024. IP practitioner
Keith Hummel and white-collar star Ben Gruenstein
represented cardiovascular-centric medical device company Abiomed, as plaintiff in a trade secret and breach of contract action brought a German entity and its founder, with whom Abiomed entered into consulting agreements under which Abiomed confidentially shared valuable proprietary information and trade secrets. Abiomed alleged that the defendant company wrongfully disclosed Abiomed’s confidential information and trade secrets to a Chinese company that was also founded by the defendant founder and that this company—an Abiomed competitor—allegedly used this information to file Chinese patent applications claiming Abiomed’s intellectual property as its own. In September 2023, the Cravath duo defeated defendants’ motion to dismiss, and the parties then reached a settlement and stipulated to the dismissal of the action in December 2024. Kevin Orsini continues to hold firm to his growing reputation as another all-purpose trial powerhouse. “Kevin can do it all – antitrust, ‘event-driven litigation’ – and he never stays in one place,” commends a peer. “He’s doing antitrust one day and wildfire cases the next!” Illustrating his fluency with “event-driven litigation” (specifically the alluded-to wildfires) Orsini acts on a team with
Omid Nasab,
Timothy Cameron Evan Norris, David Korn, and
Brittany Sukiennik representing utility Pacific Gas and Electric Company and its parent company PG&E Corporation in connection with more than 300 complaints filed in California state courts relating to the 2019 Kincade Fire, the 2020 Zogg Fire and the 2021 Dixie Fire. The complaints, filed on behalf of thousands of plaintiffs as well as a putative class, assert that PG&E’s alleged failure to properly maintain, inspect and de-energize its transmission and distribution lines was the cause of the fires. To date, the Cravath team has resolved approximately $2 billion in claims through settlements with insurance subrogation plaintiffs, various public entities and thousands of individual homeowners.
