Talk:Kasowitz, Benson, Torres & Friedman/DRAFT

Kasowitz, Benson, Torres & Friedman is a national law firm founded in 1993. The firm's initial focus was product liability litigation. It has since expanded into a range of litigation practice areas, including antitrust, banking, complex financial products, creditors' rights and bankruptcy, entertainment, insurance recovery, intellectual property, and white collar defense. Its clients include: Liggett Group, MBIA, Fairfax Financial Holdings Limited, Google, Ford Motor Company, and The Blackstone Group.

History
Kasowitz was founded in 1993 when Marc Kasowitz left Mayer Brown with two clients and 18 lawyers to create a firm focused almost entirely on complex litigation. The firm opened a second office in Houston six months later. Seven additional offices followed over the next 20 years: Newark (1997), Atlanta (2001), San Francisco (2007), Miami (2009), Silicon Valley (2011), Los Angeles (2013), and Washington, DC (2013). The firm’s notable attorneys include Joe Lieberman, former United States Senator and Clarine Nardi Riddle, former Attorney General to the State of Connecticut.

At first focused on product liability litigation, the firm represented clients such as cigarette manufacturer Liggett Group Inc., for whom Kasowitz achieved a settlement in 1997 with 22 states that Vice President Al Gore called "a historic victory for the American people."

In 2003, the firm won a $300 million settlement on behalf of 3,500 Alabama residents who were allegedly poisoned by seepage from a Monsanto Company plant manufacturing PCBs. That same year, Kasowitz defeated claims against chemical company Celanese relating to a computer microchip manufactured in International Business Machines Corporations (IBM) plants. The firm also worked on asbestos cases filed against Celanese and auto parts supplier ArvinMeritor, Inc. and overturned a $790 million jury verdict against Liggett Corp.

The firm has been involved in high profile bankruptcies, including those of WorldCom, Inc., Adelphia Communications Corporation, Enron Corp. and Global Crossing Ltd. In February 2011, the firm served as lead counsel to the debtors and debtors in possession in the bankruptcy cases of Borders Group Inc. and its subsidiaries.

In September 2011, the firm commenced 17 separate actions on behalf of the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA) against Morgan Stanley, Credit Suisse Securities (USA) LLC, RBS Securities Inc., Goldman Sachs & Co., UBS Securities LLC, JP Morgan Securities Inc., Barclays Capital Inc., SG Americas, Inc., Ally Financial Inc. (f/k/a GMAC, Inc.), Deutsche Bank Securities, Inc., and General Electric Company for misrepresentations and failures to disclose material information concerning pools of mortgage loans issued and securitized by the defendants using residential mortgage backed securities. The firm ultimately helped FHFA negotiate settlements with several of the defendants.

In March 2013, the firm helped MBIA defeat litigation brought by 18 of the world’s largest banks seeking to overturn MBIA’s 2009 corporate restructuring. The firm thereafter obtained a settlement, which also covered put-back litigation, whereby the remaining banks agreed to drop their challenge to MBIA’s restructuring, and MBIA received $1.7 billion in cash and a $500 million line of credit for its municipal bond insurance business.

That same month, the firm won a Supreme Court decision for Comcast Corp., overturning class certification in three antitrust class actions brought by a putative class of two million subscribers in each case.

In 2014, Kasowitz, Benson, Torres & Friedman was ranked as the 119th largest firm in the United States by Law360. In June, the firm was awarded the Chambers USA 2014 Award for Excellence.