Our first runners-up this week are Rich Strassberg, Sabrina Rose-Smith, Annie Railton and Valerie Haggans of Goodwin Procter representing affiliates of mortgage lender Ocwen. Just a little over a week before trial was set to start in the Eastern District of California, the Goodwin team got an anti-kickback class action in which plaintiffs were seeking almost $400 million in damages dismissed with prejudice. The Goodwin lawyers came into the case in September 2020 after it had already been underway for more than a decade. After the Supreme Court handed down its 2021 decision in TransUnion v. Ramirez, the Goodwin team pressed arguments that plaintiffs could not prove their “informational injury” theory of standing with class-wide evidence. Late last month, Judge M. Miller Baker, sitting by designation in the Eastern District from the U.S. Court of International Trade, precluded plaintiffs from relying on new evidence to allege monetary harm.
Rich Edlin, the vice chairman of Greenberg Traurig, also gets a runners-up nod this week for winning summary judgment for client Nomura Credit and Capital in a long-running case in New York state court centering around construction financing for a now-defunct mall in Rochester. The developer on the project claimed Nomura acted in bad faith when it failed to extend a $54 million draw request in 2009 on a $135 million loan agreement that was set to expire. The plaintiff was seeking lost profits from the project north of $1 billion. But Manhattan Commercial Division Justice Robert Reed held this week that the developer had failed to meet all the conditions for a loan extension and that Nomura had made a sufficient showing that there was no bad faith. Reed further held there was nothing in the loan agreement “which would support a finding that the parties contemplated lost profits as damages for breach.”
