Our first runners-up this week are Orin Snyder, Matthew Benjamin and Laura Kathryn O’Boyle of Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher and their co-counsel Josh Dubin. After a four-week jury trial in Manhattan Supreme Court’s Commercial Division, the parent companies of Tinder – Match Group, Inc. and IAC/InterActiveCorp. – agreed this week to pay $441 million to their clients, the founders and early employees of the popular dating app, the day before the case was scheduled to go to the jury. The trial, which tested the plaintiffs’ claims that defendants had breached contracts covering their stock options, featured testimony from IAC Chairman Barry Diller and former Match Group head Greg Blatt.
Runners-up honors also go to a Proskauer Rose team led by Seth Schafler for work on a case for Bear Stearns successor JP Morgan that Schafler has dubbed the “phoenix of insurance coverage cases.” The suit dates back to 2009 and insurers have maintained that a $140 million disgorgement payment Bear Stearns made to the SEC was an uninsurable penalty. The New York Court of Appeals, however, last week revived the coverage dispute for a second time, siding with JP Morgan. “Inasmuch as it was derived from estimates of the ill-gotten gains and harm flowing from the improper trading practices, and was intended—at least in part—to compensate those injured by the wrongdoing allegedly facilitated by Bear Stearns, the $140 million disgorgement payment could not fairly have been understood as a ‘penalty’ in the context of this wrongful act professional liability insurance policy” wrote Chief Judge Janet DiFiore. Schafler has been joined on the case by partner Steven Obus, who argued at the Court of Appeals, and special litigation counsel Matthew Morris.
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