Milberg LLP was founded in 1965 and was one of the first law firms to prosecute class actions in federal courts on behalf of investors and consumers. The Firm pioneered this type of litigation and is widely recognized as one of the nation's leading defenders of the rights of victims of corporate and other large-scale wrongdoing. The Firm has principal offices in New York City, Los Angeles and Tampa. The Firm’s practice focuses on the prosecution of class and complex actions in many fields of commercial litigation, emphasizing securities, corporate fiduciary, ERISA, consumer, insurance, antitrust, mass tort, human rights, and related areas of litigation.
In the Firm’s early years, its founding partners built a new area of legal practice in representing shareholders’ interests under the then recently amended Rule 23 of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, which allowed securities fraud cases, among others, to proceed as class actions. In the following decades, the Firm obtained decisions that established important legal precedents in many of its areas of practice and prosecuted cases that set benchmarks in terms of case theories, organization, discovery, trial results, methods of settlement, and amounts recovered and distributed to clients and class members.
Important milestones in the Firm’s early years include the Firm’s involvement in the U.S. Financial litigation in the early 1970s, one of the earliest large class actions, which resulted in the $50 million recovery for purchasers of the securities of a failed real estate development company; the Ninth Circuit decision in Blackie v. Barrack in 1975, which established the fraud-on-the-market doctrine for securities fraud actions; the Firm’s co-lead counsel position in the In re Washington Public Power Supply System (WPPSS) Securities Litigation, a seminal securities fraud action in the 1980s in terms of complexity and amounts recovered; the representation of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. in a year-long trial to recover banking losses from a major accounting firm, leading to a precedent-setting global settlement; attacking the Drexel-Milken “daisy chain” of illicit junk-bond financing arrangements with numerous cases that resulted in substantial recoveries for investors; representing life insurance policyholders defrauded by “vanishing premium” and other improper sales tactics and obtaining large recoveries from industry participants; and ground-breaking roles in the multi-front attack on deception and other improper activities in the tobacco industry.
Milberg remains at the forefront in its areas of practice. Significant litigation results include: Tyco International Ltd. Securities Litigation. ($3.2 billion settlement); Nortel Networks Litigation (settlement for cash and stock valued at $1.142 billion); Lucent Technologies Securities Litigation ($600 million recovery); Raytheon Co. Securities Litigation ($460 million recovery); Managed Care Litigation (recoveries over $1 billion and major changes in HMO practices); the WPPSS litigation (settlements totaling $775 million), and NASDAQ Market Makers Antitrust Litigation ($1 billion recoveries). Milberg has been responsible for recoveries valued at approximately $45 billion during the life of the Firm.
The Firm is consistently active in pro bono litigation, highlighted by its leadership role in the Swiss Bank Litigation, which led to the recovery of $1.25 billion from Swiss banks to benefit victims of the Holocaust and its efforts representing claimants of the September 11 Victim Compensation Fund.
The Firm’s lawyers come from many different professional backgrounds. They include former federal or state prosecutors, private defense attorneys, and government lawyers. The Firm’s ability to pursue claims against defendants is augmented by its team of investigators, headed by a former agent for the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and a full-time staff of forensic accountants and financial analysts.
