Let’s get right to it with this week’s runners-up for Litigator of the Week.
Robert Wick of Covington & Burling and Richard Pepperman of Sullivan & Cromwell, represented J.P. Morgan Securities and Goldman Sachs & Co. respectively, among others, in scuttling plaintiffs’ plans to certify a class in In re Aluminum Warehousing Antitrust Litigation. In a whopping 119-page opinion issued July 23, U.S District Judge Paul Engelmayer in Manhattan found that the plaintiffs, industrial users of aluminum, presented too many individual issues to support class certification in the case accusing the defendants of forming a conspiracy to inflate prices in the primary aluminum market. The judge’s ruling leaves just the 10 named plaintiffs’ claims standing and eliminates potentially billions in class-wide damages. (Extra kudos to Covington and S&C on the joint nomination.)
