Our first runners-up for Litigator of the Week this week are lawyers at Korein Tillery and Pearson, Simon & Warshaw who reached a proposed deal with Major League Baseball which agreed to pay $185 million to current and former minor league baseball players in one of the largest-ever wage-and-hour class action settlements. After eight-and-a-half years of litigation, including a five-year class certification fight, MLB also agreed to rescind its prohibition against compensating minor leaguers outside of the five-month regular season. The settlement is set for a preliminary approval hearing next month before Chief U.S. Magistrate Judge Joseph Spero in San Francisco. The plaintiffs’ team includes Stephen Tillery, Garrett Broshuis, Marc Wallenstein and Diane Moore of Korein Tillery and Clifford Pearson, Daniel Warshaw, Bobby Pouya, and Benjamin Shiftan of Pearson, Simon & Warshaw.
Runners-up honors also go to appellate teams at Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher, Jones Day and Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison who represent mining giant Rio Tinto, its former CEO and former CFO respectively in a high-profile appellate showdown with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. In a decision this week roundly rejecting the SEC’s approach to “scheme liability” in securities cases, the Second Circuit found that false statements and omissions alone can’t form the basis of claims of a scheme to defraud investors. The Gibson Dunn team representing the company included Tom Dupree, Mark Kirsch, Richard Grime, Jennifer Conn and Kellam Conover. Sarah Levine, James Loonam and Matt Rubenstein of Jones Day represented former Rio Tinto CEO Thomas Albanese. Kannon Shanmugam, Walter Ricciardi, Geoff Chepiga and Ted Wells of Paul Weiss represented the company’s former CFO Guy Elliott.
