STB, Cozen Bickering

Flickr pic: catdusting

This is just the sort of bickering we love.

Barry Ostrager (CUNY BA ‘68, NYU JD ‘72, CUNY MA ‘73) of Simpson Thacher represents Travelers Indemnity, which recently squared off at the Supreme Court against Chubb Insurance, represented by Jacob Cohn (Penn BA ‘85, Pittsburgh JD ‘88) of Cozen O’Connor. Head over to The American Lawyer to get the full “procedural history” (to use an expression we haven’t used since law school). Suffice to say, it’s the astonishingly confusing result you’d expect when you mix 23 years of insurance companies, bankruptcy, and asbestos litigation.

Ostrager isn’t happy with Cozen O’Connor. He told an Am Law Litigation Daily reporter, “whoever has been advising Chubb, gave them the worst advice any lawyer ever gave a client.” Chubb lept to its counsel’s defense in a statement, saying “in our view, Mr. Ostrager is in a poor position to comment on the quality of legal advice, given his apparent advice that Travelers pay nearly half a billion dollars to settle claims that already have been proven to be spurious.”

The rest of the squabble after the jump.

Stephen Cozen (Penn BA ‘61, JD ‘64), chairman of the eponymous firm, also defended his partner. He sent a letter to Am Law taking senior writer Alison Frankel to task for publishing the comments. He also said a bunch of other stuff about precedent and legal-sounding stuff. Somewhat curiously, he copies the Chubb COO, John Degnan (a former lawyer, as it happens), but not the GC – Maureen Brundage, a former securities partner at White & Case.

Anyway, back to the spat.

Ostrager decided to try to take the grown-up path, sort of. He sent a letter of his own to Cozen with a copy to Frankel. In addition to more law-talking stuff, he apologizes for the comments, but still has to get in a last jab about the Travelers position being “unfathomable.”

Dear readers, if you want to quarrel with opposing counsel, PLEASE! put us squarely in the middle. We’d be happy to serve as an intermediary for your petty squabbling.

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