Focusing on insurance coverage matters and commercial litigation, Meredith Elkins represents clients at every stage of disputes, including trials and appeals. With a practice that is national in scope, she is highly experienced in advocating in state, federal, and appellate courts in Texas, New York, Delaware, and California, as well as serving clients in other jurisdictions.
In her practice, Meredith advises a diverse range of organizations in industries including financial services, pharmaceuticals, alternative energy, technology, manufacturing, hospitality, and food production. An experienced and sophisticated trial lawyer, Meredith’s excellent oral advocacy talents, writing skills, and ability to distill complicated legal issues into clear, comprehensible language give her a major advantage in persuading judges and juries and gaining the best possible outcomes for her clients.
Throughout the course of her career, Meredith has secured several groundbreaking victories, including a substantial verdict in a jury trial against several insurers that denied coverage for financial services organization TIAA-CREF following class actions stemming from its software implementation effort. That verdict was affirmed by the Delaware Supreme Court on appeal.
Recently, Meredith secured a Delaware Superior Court win for Immunomedics Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Gilead Sciences, in a case involving insurance coverage following a securities class action lawsuit, when the court granted Immunomedics’ motion for summary judgment and denied Hudson Insurance Company’s cross-motion, confirming the claim was not barred by the policy’s “relatedness” provisions.
Meredith was also part of an all-women team that secured a precedential ruling allowing a pandemic-related insurance coverage case brought by policyholder JDS Construction Group, LLC to move forward, and has achieved successes in other business interruption litigations that buck the national trends in such cases.
In the general liability context, Meredith secured three federal court decisions affirming Chubb’s duty to defend its policyholder CONMED Corp. in a series of toxic tort litigations.
Within Cohen Ziffer, Meredith serves as the firm’s hiring partner. Since the firm’s launch in January 2021, the firm has tripled in size, and Meredith has overseen the recruiting and hiring process of all of the firm’s new attorneys. Notably, nearly half of the firm’s attorneys are female, and more than 30% are otherwise diverse.
Meredith’s litigation prowess and strong leadership have earned her recognition as a Plaintiffs’ Lawyers Trailblazer by The National Law Journal, an Insurance Rising Star by Law360, and a Woman Worth Watching by Profiles in Leadership Journal. This past year, she was also named to Lawdragon’s 500 X – The Next Generation Guide and won Business Insurance’s Break Out Award.
