Litigation

Our Capabilities

Our ability to handle large, complex litigation matters has been in the national spotlight because of BakerHostetler’s representation of the SIPA Trustee for the liquidation of Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities LLC (BLMIS). Since 2008, BakerHostetler has been unraveling, deconstructing and litigating one of the largest and most complex financial frauds in U.S. history – Bernard L. Madoff’s decades-long Ponzi scheme. The SIPA Trustee’s unprecedented success in this global investigation and litigation is largely based on the legal strategy and case management overseen by our attorneys, who bring a wide range of experience to this matter, including business litigation, bankruptcy law, white collar criminal investigation, securities litigation, e-discovery and corporate finance. As of July 2022, the SIPA Trustee and his counsel have succeeded in recovering more than $14.5 billion and distributing more than $13.6 billion to victims in the Madoff Recovery Initiative (www.madofftrustee.com). This recovery far exceeds any prior restitution effort related to Ponzi schemes in terms of both dollars and percentage of stolen funds recovered.

• Our Commercial Litigation Team, comprising 130+ lawyers across 17 offices, defends clients in high stakes, bet the company matters. In late 2016, the team represented a global engineering company in an indemnity case arising out of the explosion of a food manufacturing plant in Garner, North Carolina. Following a four-week jury trial, the jury returned a verdict of $108.9 million in favor of the client, two times the amount of the largest verdict in Nebraska at that time. This verdict was recognized by the National Law Journal as a “Top 50 Verdict” of 2016 in its Elite Trial Lawyers report, and in 2021, was included in National Law Journal’s “Verdicts Hall of Fame” publication.
• Our Antitrust and Competition Team received a national first chair ranking from Best Lawyers in America, and was named a “top team working in the hub of antitrust law” by Global Competition Review . With more than 40 antitrust lawyers firmwide, we have successfully tried numerous antitrust and competition cases to verdict, and have represented both plaintiffs and defendants in antitrust and competition litigation, including class action lawsuits. We also advise clients on all aspects of their businesses and successfully help them navigate the merger review process, frequently obtaining clearance of transactions without government investigations.
• Our White Collar, Investigations and Securities Enforcement and Litigation Team represents Fortune 50 companies, major hedge funds and individuals facing government scrutiny. Our lawyers have served as former United States attorneys, assistant United States attorneys, assistant district attorneys and SEC enforcement attorneys. Their experience has proven invaluable not only in representing clients in dealings with the SEC, DOJ, IRS, FTC and other federal and state agencies, but also in advising corporations on compliance implementation and testing. BakerHostetler has also been repeatedly selected to conduct complex monitorships for world-leading financial institutions such as Merrill Lynch, Bank of New York and Mellon Bank.
• Our Class Action Team has defended more than 200 national and state class actions for major corporations in more than 25 states in the last five years. We aggressively defend against class certification, and in the event the class is certified, we are prepared to try the case to judgment.
• BakerHostetler’s dedicated 80-attorney Energy Team, nationally ranked by Chambers USA, understands the industry’s rapidly evolving regulatory, legal and political climate. It has experience across all the proven shale plays and has an unmatched ability to represent clients at all points in the life cycle of energy development. Lawyers on our energy team have technical degrees and have worked in-house with major energy companies.
• Unlike most law firms, our firm’s E-Discovery Advocacy and Management Team is led by seasoned trial lawyers who understand how information is used in litigation. Our advocacy controls costs, risks and burdens by limiting the scope of discovery. We defensibly deploy emerging technologies like predictive coding to cut through the noise of large data sets. We also build practical preservation and litigation response plans, and defend against claims of intentional or inadvertent loss of data. From sophisticated keyword screens to data categorization and clustering to technology-assisted review, we have negotiated and won court approval of sophisticated approaches to search and review. Our experience in the courtroom coupled with our ability to break down complex technological issues has saved many of our clients hundreds of thousands of dollars or more in individual cases.