They called it “a tale of two Citis.”

Representing Lehman Brothers and its creditors committee, Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan partner Andrew Rossman led a team in securing a $1.74 billion settlement from Citigroup on Sept. 29.

It was a massive effort. The opening arguments in In Re: Lehman Brothers Holdings, the remnants of the collapsed financial firm's attempts to claw back derivatives stakes from Citigroup, spoke to the awesome magnitude of the undertaking.

“Your opening is usually an hour or something like that,” Rossman said. “We were at the podium the whole day.”

After four months of trial, the parties agreed to settle. The reasoning behind the terms is opaque; Rossman himself said he couldn't discuss much of what went into it. But what's clear is that it's a significant win for Rossman's team and his clients in the largest derivatives suit to go to trial.

The conflict stems from a $2 billion cash deposit that Lehman made with Citibank on June 12, 2008. The firm filed for bankruptcy three months later. Citi claimed it was entitled to keep the money.

The parties talked on and off throughout the trial, he said, at both the business level as well as between attorneys. The court-led mediation came after a summer recess in the case. After intensive, almost round-the-clock discussions over five days, a resolution was reached.

“By the time we had four months of trial, I think everybody had a pretty good idea as to what the case was shaping up to be,” Rossman said.

The process began with how Rossman and his team organized the trial itself. There were 30 expert witnesses and thousands of pages of expert reports, he said. A million-plus trade database had to be crunched. Some 150 depositions had to be taken. And there were millions of pages of documents to get through.

“In terms of cases going to trial, this is the longest and most complex case I've ever seen by an order of magnitude,” he said. “The sheer size of this thing was like nothing you can compare it to.”

For Rossman's team, the name of the game was simplicity: how to bring something so big and so complex down to something manageably comprehensible—not just for themselves, but also for U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Shelley Chapman of the Southern District of New York.

“It took a lot of work to put this together in the opening, but I said we're going to help the judge understand how an entire bank's derivative trading works starting with one bet on a Mets-Yankees baseball game,” Rossman said.

Making the information accessible was only one piece of the puzzle. Rossman and his team also worked hard to make sure it was being presented in a way that made sense. To do so, the trial would operate as a series of mini-trials, Rossman said.

The 30,000-plus trades at issue were broken down by product areas, and even sub-product areas. The single biggest piece of the $2 billion dispute was Lehman's credit-trading business. That's where they started, focusing first on flow credit issues, and then descending into further discrete areas within the overall topic as needed.

Rather than have each side present its case in succession, witnesses were juxtaposed. That is, Citi's fact witnesses would go first, then its particular product-area expert, followed by Lehman's own experts, “so the judge could see the dueling experts side-by-side,” Rossman said.

As the trial proceeded, Rossman and his team hammered home the theme of “two Citis.”

“The idea was, here's how Citi runs its business every day, versus here's how Citi priced its claim in the bankruptcy court against Lehman, and how different they were, trying to use Citi's own regular-court practices as the right barometer for determining what they should have done,” he said. “We were always trying to come back to that very simple theme to make it understandable.”

After four months, they “finished just past the halfway mark,” said Rossman.

Since 2008, Rossman has steered all of Lehman's big bank litigation. The Citi settlement resolves the disputes with 12 of 13 banks. Only Credit Suisse remains unsettled.

Rossman said his clients have retained the same posture throughout the process.

“Lehman's always available to talk to people,” he said.

Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan

They called it “a tale of two Citis.”

Representing Lehman Brothers and its creditors committee, Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan partner Andrew Rossman led a team in securing a $1.74 billion settlement from Citigroup on Sept. 29.

It was a massive effort. The opening arguments in In Re: Lehman Brothers Holdings, the remnants of the collapsed financial firm's attempts to claw back derivatives stakes from Citigroup, spoke to the awesome magnitude of the undertaking.

“Your opening is usually an hour or something like that,” Rossman said. “We were at the podium the whole day.”

After four months of trial, the parties agreed to settle. The reasoning behind the terms is opaque; Rossman himself said he couldn't discuss much of what went into it. But what's clear is that it's a significant win for Rossman's team and his clients in the largest derivatives suit to go to trial.

The conflict stems from a $2 billion cash deposit that Lehman made with Citibank on June 12, 2008. The firm filed for bankruptcy three months later. Citi claimed it was entitled to keep the money.

The parties talked on and off throughout the trial, he said, at both the business level as well as between attorneys. The court-led mediation came after a summer recess in the case. After intensive, almost round-the-clock discussions over five days, a resolution was reached.

“By the time we had four months of trial, I think everybody had a pretty good idea as to what the case was shaping up to be,” Rossman said.

The process began with how Rossman and his team organized the trial itself. There were 30 expert witnesses and thousands of pages of expert reports, he said. A million-plus trade database had to be crunched. Some 150 depositions had to be taken. And there were millions of pages of documents to get through.

“In terms of cases going to trial, this is the longest and most complex case I've ever seen by an order of magnitude,” he said. “The sheer size of this thing was like nothing you can compare it to.”

For Rossman's team, the name of the game was simplicity: how to bring something so big and so complex down to something manageably comprehensible—not just for themselves, but also for U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Shelley Chapman of the Southern District of New York.

“It took a lot of work to put this together in the opening, but I said we're going to help the judge understand how an entire bank's derivative trading works starting with one bet on a Mets-Yankees baseball game,” Rossman said.

Making the information accessible was only one piece of the puzzle. Rossman and his team also worked hard to make sure it was being presented in a way that made sense. To do so, the trial would operate as a series of mini-trials, Rossman said.

The 30,000-plus trades at issue were broken down by product areas, and even sub-product areas. The single biggest piece of the $2 billion dispute was Lehman's credit-trading business. That's where they started, focusing first on flow credit issues, and then descending into further discrete areas within the overall topic as needed.

Rather than have each side present its case in succession, witnesses were juxtaposed. That is, Citi's fact witnesses would go first, then its particular product-area expert, followed by Lehman's own experts, “so the judge could see the dueling experts side-by-side,” Rossman said.

As the trial proceeded, Rossman and his team hammered home the theme of “two Citis.”

“The idea was, here's how Citi runs its business every day, versus here's how Citi priced its claim in the bankruptcy court against Lehman, and how different they were, trying to use Citi's own regular-court practices as the right barometer for determining what they should have done,” he said. “We were always trying to come back to that very simple theme to make it understandable.”

After four months, they “finished just past the halfway mark,” said Rossman.

Since 2008, Rossman has steered all of Lehman's big bank litigation. The Citi settlement resolves the disputes with 12 of 13 banks. Only Credit Suisse remains unsettled.

Rossman said his clients have retained the same posture throughout the process.

“Lehman's always available to talk to people,” he said.