Complex Civil Litigation

Overview

Our Practice

“Their Commercial awareness of my space is fantastic. When using them for negotiation, the fact that they take the time to understand my firm is critical.”

-ChambersUSA 2022 Rankings

We have a tremendous depth of experience and success representing both plaintiffs and defendants in complex commercial disputes.  Our practice encompasses complex contract disputes, business ownership disputes, litigation following the purchase and sale of businesses, including earnout and accounting disputes, fraud, securities and commodities trading, trust and estate litigation, bankruptcy, claims for misappropriation of trade secrets and violations of non-competition agreements, and antitrust.

We represent individuals, officers of Fortune 100 companies, closely held and public companies, private equity funds, hospital groups, real estate investment trusts, high-frequency trading firms and traders, corporate whistleblowers and many others. We take on powerful opponents, from the City of Chicago to hedge funds, to large public companies.  And we win.

Our lawyers led the successful litigation to recover hundreds of millions of dollars for creditors in fraud suits we brought arising from the $600 million collapse of Sentinel Management. We employed a novel theory to achieve an allowed claim for fraud for one of the largest claimholders in the Thomas Petters Ponzi scheme bankruptcy.  We successfully defended three former officers of a major retailer now in bankruptcy.  We defeated a one-billion dollar trade secret claim brought by one of the country’s largest hedge funds against its former head of high-frequency trading. We defeated a $7 million claim on behalf of a REIT in a suit brought by a lender for breach of a guaranty on a CMBS loan.


Our recent trial victories include:

  • Winning arbitration of a multi-million earnout dispute brought by a family that sold a manufacturing business to our client and claimed to have been underpaid.
  • Winning a $1.8 million judgment in arbitration over a contract dispute for a data analytics firm in a dispute over a development contract for Internet of Things (IoT) devices.
  • Winning a $2 million dollar compensatory and punitive damages judgment for a physician against his former company and managing partner who withheld his equity.
  • Winning a multi-million dollar judgment against an individual who defrauded an elderly woman in a contract to make a will.
  • Defeating at trial a $5 million contract claim brought against our client, a major high-frequency trading firm, for breach of contract, fraud, and retaliatory discharge.