Boies (L) & Greenberg
Round 1 of the heavyweight bout between two of the top litigators practicing today went to David Boies of the eponymous Boies Schiller & Flexner. After less than an hour’s deliberation, the jury found his client, Hank Greenberg, had not wrongfully removed several billion dollars worth of AIG stock from a company he controlled. AIG was represented by Paul Weiss’s Ted Wells.
More on the case and the lawyers, after the jump.
AIG had claimed that Greenberg, the former CEO of AIG, had looted some AIG stock held by Starr International (SICO) for his own benefit. AIG claimed the stock had been parked in SICO in the 1970s to finance an AIG executive -pension plan. Greenberg sold the stock in 2005 for $4.3 billion (it had been worth as much as $20 billion) and invested it in other securities and gave it to some charities. When he sued AIG to get back some personal belongings (an art collection), AIG countersued to get him to make good on the pension obligations.
Yesterday, Wells told the jury that Greenberg was a brazen liar who fabricated history, according to Reuters. Boies countered that Greenberg was a generous and law-abiding citizen who was well within his rights.
The jury went with the former Cravath lawyer.
Basically, if there is a list of top litigators, Boies and Wells are on it. They’ve both been NLJ litigators of the year, and won pretty much every significant honor in their field. Frankly, there’s just too much to recount.
Believe it or not, we chose that boxing metaphor on purpose. A few years ago, the Washington Post described Wells’s preparation for closing arguments in his defense of Scooter Libby:
Before beginning his argument yesterday morning, he paced in front of the empty jury box. He stood in a corner –tall, athletic, mustachioed — like a fighter imaging the bout to come. Under the outwardly gentle guise you could see an inner toughness of someone who will use any combination of punches to win big.
Wells (Holy Cross BA ‘72, Harvard MBA, JD ‘76) did have another bad loss earlier this year. He appeared for some of the tobacco companies in the big RICO loss in the Federal Circuit. He is also working for Citibank in the suit against MBIA (for whom he won a $364 million verdict from Parmalat last year). At least he has friends in high places: he tells a tale of an all-night, caffeine-fueled drive from Holy Cross (which he attended on a football scholarship, but dropped the sport after his freshman year) to visit law school recruiters at Fordham when he was a freshman. The driver was sophomore Clarence Thomas.
Boies (Northwestern BS ‘64, Yale LLB ‘66, NYU LLM ‘67) is getting more warm-and-fuzzy accolades lately. He and Ted Olson, his adversary in Bush v. Gore and pretty much ideological opposite, have joined hands (so to speak) in opposition to California’s Proposition 8. Boies has both written a memoir, Courting Justice: From NY Yankees v. Major League Baseball to Bush v. Gore
He also has the honor of having been played by Ed Begley in the HBO movie about Bush v. Gore.
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If they're talking about stock changes from the 1970s, I'd highly doubt anyone could plan and execute a nearly forty-year-old heist that Greenberg was accused.
Sorry if it was confusing. He sold the AIG stock held by SICO about 4 years ago, right after he got ousted from AIG.