Mr. Kaufman is an experienced trial and appellate lawyer representing business clients in litigation involving a broad range of substantive areas, including securities, RICO, insurance, real estate, and banking. He has successfully defended dozens of law and accounting firms in securities class actions and other complex professional liability suits, as well as corporate directors and officers in class actions, shareholder derivative actions, and cases brought by bankruptcy trustees and creditors. He has also won a string of victories for insurance companies both in coverage litigation with insureds and in disputes with reinsurers; for commercial banks in class actions brought by borrowers; and for major hotel organizations and publicly-traded REITS in RICO and other suits brought by investors.

Mr. Kaufman recently served as co-lead trial counsel for the Bank Group in the Owens Corning mass tort asbestos bankruptcy litigation, where the debtors and other major creditor groups sought to wipe out more than $1 billion of the Banks’ recovery by substantively consolidating subsidiaries of Owens Corning from which the Banks had received guarantees and against which no other major creditor group had claims. Following trial and an appeal in the Third Circuit, the Banks defeated substantive consolidation and obtained a full recovery of their outstanding indebtedness plus interest. Mr. Kaufman also served as lead trial counsel for the FrontierVision bondholders in the Adelphia Communications Corp. bankruptcy litigation over how properly to allocate among creditors the $17.5 billion realized from the sale of the debtors’ assets. A settlement of that litigation during trial paid FrontierVision bondholders $430 million, or 130 percent of par value.

Mr. Kaufman’s other recent cases include:

• the defense of a prominent law firm and one of its senior partners in the multidistrict securities class action arising from the collapse of Towers Financial Corporation, where he won dismissal of all federal and state law claims asserted against his clients, including the precedent-setting dismissal in the Second Circuit of plaintiffs’ § 10(b) “conspiracy” claims
• the defense of American National Fire Insurance Company against claims by MetLife that some $2 billion of losses it had sustained in fraudulent sales practices suits were covered under liability policies issued by American National, where all such claims were dismissed on summary judgment
• the defense of ACE American Insurance Co. in an action by Wendy’s International to recover, under E&O policies, amounts paid by Wendy’s to settle claims asserted by franchisees based on alleged misrepresentations in the marketing and sale of franchise locations, where the action was dismissed by summary judgment.
• the defense of ACE American in coverage litigation brought by three other insurers to recover the proceeds of a professional liability policy issued by ACE to an insurance agency that had acted as the insurers’ managing general agent in connection with various underwriting programs, and against which the insurers had obtained a substantial judgment, resulting in dismissal of the suit on summary judgment and subsequent affirmance of that dismissal by the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals
• the defense of a major hotel organization and its principals against civil RICO and other claims arising from their syndication of various hotel properties to outside investors, resulting in the dismissal of all claims either on motion to dismiss or by summary judgment

J.D., magna cum laude, Brooklyn Law School, 1976

• Notes Editor, Brooklyn Law Review 1975-1976

B.A., New York University, 1972

New York, 1977

U.S. Supreme Court
U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit
U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit
U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit
U.S. District Court, Southern District of New York
U.S. District Court, Eastern District of New York

The Association of the Bar of the City of New York