First up are David Boies and Sigrid McCawley of Boies Schiller Flexner who rerpresent Virginia Giuffre, a victim in the Jeffrey Epstein/Ghislaine Maxwell sex-trafficking ring. This week they filed court papers indicating Giuffre had reached a settlement in her civil suit against Prince Andrew that would include a “substantial donation” by the prince to Giuffre’s charity for victims’ rights. “Prince Andrew has never intended to malign Ms. Giuffre’s character, and he accepts that she has suffered both as an established victim of abuse and as a result of unfair public attacks,” said a joint statement announcing the settlement. Boies and McCawley were previously tapped for Litigator of the Week honors when Maxwell’s deposition in a separate case brought by Giuffre was unsealed in 2020.
Runners-up honors also go to a Ballard Spahr trial team led by David Axelrod with major contributions from Jay Ward Brown, Tom Sullivan and Jacquelyn Schell who defended The New York Times in a high-profile defamation lawsuit brought by former Alaska Governor and Republican Vice Presidential candidate Sarah Palin. A Manhattan federal jury this week found the paper and its former opinions editor James Bennet were not liable for defamation after a 2017 editorial falsely linked Palin’s political action committee to a mass shooting. The verdict came a day after Senior U.S. District Judge Jed Rakoff, who was overseeing the case, said he would rule the former Alaska governor failed to show evidence the newspaper’s editors acted with “actual malice.” (Post-verdict, some jurors reported to Rakoff that they’d received push notifications of his ruling on their phones. But the judge said the jurors assured him the news had not impacted their verdict.) The Ballard Spahr trial team also included Leslie Minora, Gianni DiMezza and Celeste Phillips.
