With seven of its 12 global offices situated strategically throughout the US, Proskauer provides a wide range of services to clients across a broad spectrum of practices ranging from commercial to intellectual property, securities to white-collar crime and investigations, as well as its near-unparalleled status in specialty areas of employment, entertainment and sports law.
The firm has also seen a pronounced spike in its bankruptcy profile, solidly on the strength of its mammoth appointment as lead outside counsel to the Financial Oversight and Management Board for Puerto Rico, which was created to oversee the restructuring of Puerto Rico's finances, valued at $125 billion, in accordance with the Puerto Rico Oversight, Management, and Economic Stability Act (PROMESA.) The Board's mandate is to return Puerto Rico to fiscal health with access to the capital markets, and to initiate pro-growth reforms designed to generate a free flow of capital between Puerto Rico and the US. This long-running and sprawling action involves a team of Proskauer attorneys from numerous offices, including Boston’s Timothy Mungovan, New York’s Martin Bienenstock and Margaret Dale, and Los Angeles’ Michael Firestein, all of whom have played substantial roles in the manifold turns of action in this matter since its beginnings. Dale, a commercial litigator who has made a noted pivot to bankruptcy, is involved in several other Puerto Rico-related issues, primarily dealing with employee retirement issues.
In the latest chapter of this saga, in March 2023, the firm team prevailed in litigation against the Governor and Legislature of Puerto Rico seeking to nullify a statute that made numerous, sweeping changes to the employment laws in Puerto Rico and imposed significant restrictions on private employers in violation of the Oversight Board’s certified Fiscal Plan. Because the Governor violated PROMESA by failing to submit required evidence showing that the statute was consistent with the Fiscal Plan, the Court nullified the law. The Governor and Legislature have filed urgent appeals to the First Circuit, and the Legislature and Governor have both sought stays of the District Court’s ruling. Also in March 2023, the Proskauer team achieved a significant victory on behalf of the Oversight Board in ongoing litigation regarding bonds issued by the Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority, the sole electricity provider on the island.
LA’s
Bart Williams, not only one of the firm’s most celebrated trial lawyers but also the country’s, has been at the forefront of several milestone matters every year, with this one being no exception. Williams is trial counsel for Gilead Sciences in several high-stakes matters. One involves thousands of California state and federal product liability actions brought by approximately 20,000 plaintiffs related to Gilead’s life-saving HIV prevention and treatment drugs. The cases allege that Gilead was negligent in its development of certain of these drugs and that they were defectively designed and failed adequately to warn about the increased risk of potential kidney disease and bone injury that could result from use of these medications. The first federal bellwether trial is set for January 2024. In another matter, Williams scored a landmark win for this same client, securing a significant trial victory in a $3.6 billion antitrust case on allegations that the pharmaceutical company struck an anticompetitive "pay-for-delay" patent settlement related to two of its HIV medications. In July 2023, a San Francisco jury delivered a full defense verdict following a six-week trial. Williams, along with swiftly rising New York star
Lee Popkin, was also trial counsel for Monsanto in a jury trial that was scheduled to commence in March 2023 in San Francisco. The case was brought by an alleged former user of the Monsanto herbicide Roundup and his wife, who claimed that Roundup caused him to develop non-Hodgkin's Lymphoma. The matter settled favorably for the client on the eve of the trial.
Proskauer has been particularly active, and successful, in the antitrust capacity as of late.
Chris Ondeck, co-head of the firm’s antitrust group and co-head of its DC office, scored big for Wayne Farms when, after nearly seven years of litigation, he secured a complete victory at summary judgment in the broiler chicken litigation, in which plaintiffs alleged that the top 21 chicken producers in the US, including the client, unlawfully agreed to work together to reduce the supply of chicken over a 10-year period as part of a two-hub conspiracy. Plaintiffs claimed damages valued at $45 billion in total. Wayne Farms is one of a small group of defendants that has not settled any part of the case, and instead proceeded to summary judgment. In June 2023, the court granted summary judgment in favor of Wayne Farms and six other defendants, with one additional defendant (who, while being represented by another firm, was not granted summary judgment) is scheduled to proceed to trial in September 2023. Another DC-based antitrust co-chair,
Colin Kass represents Bright Data, a web data service with a specialty in artificial intelligence, in its multi-jurisdictional litigation against social media behemoth Meta, who, in December 2022, issued a cease-and-desist notice against the client, claiming that its user terms prohibit scraping its websites. The duo of Ondeck and Kass worked in tandem on yet another poultry-related antitrust matter on behalf of Butterball in a case involving an alleged information exchange conspiracy. Plaintiffs, turkey purchasers, allege that major turkey producers around the country, including Butterball, fixed prices, agreed to reduce output, and exchanged confidential information through Agri Stats, a subscription benchmarking service, in order to curb supply and raise the price of turkey to artificially high levels.
