Legal News

In Battle of the Super Litigators, Boies Trumps Wells

By Ashby Jones

In the big jury trial of the early summer, Boies, Schiller & Flexner’s David Boies has beaten Paul Weiss’s Ted Wells.

Yes, there were real parties involved with real money at stake, but part of us wishes this were the last episode of an American Idol like reality show pitting lawyers against lawyers, and we could focus exclusively on the battle royale of the bold-faced named litigators.

But luckily for us, the underlying lawsuit was interesting too. The jury, which returned its verdict only after a few hours of deliberation, rejected claims that Starr International, repped by Boies, a sister company to American International Group, repped by Wells, improperly seized control of millions of shares of the insurer’s stock at the urging of Hank Greenberg, AIG’s former chief executive. The jury found that Starr International, or SICO, wasn’t liable for claims that it violated a trust agreement and improperly converted, or took, the block of shares. Click here for the WSJ story.

U.S. District Judge Jed Rakoff, who is presiding, is separately considering the breach of trust claim and expects to deliver a decision by August at the latest.

“This is not the final judgment,” the judge said. “There is still the other shoe that needs to drop, so to speak.”

AIG sued SICO in U.S. District Court in Manhattan for $4.3 billion in damages — representing the sale of tens of millions of AIG shares since Greenberg was forced out as AIG’s top executive in 2005 — and the return of millions of shares SICO controls. The stock went to SICO as part of a reorganization of AIG and its affiliates in 1970.

The insurer claimed the shares were set aside in a trust to fund a deferred-compensation plan for select AIG employees and executives and were improperly diverted by SICO and its management.

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on July 07, 2009 (boomark / email).