Our national Financial Services Litigation practice leverages our seasoned trial, business banking, and regulatory lawyers to represent our clients throughout the United States in any litigation context. We defend claims as diverse and complex as the financial products and services our institutional clients offer. We prosecute, in certain select circumstances, claims against bad actors whose misfeasance or malfeasance has economically harmed lenders, institutional or corporate investors, and individual shareholders.
client segments and service areas
broker-dealer arbitration
Tucker Ellis lawyers defend the spectrum of customer and employment claims in the broker-dealer context. We defend and prosecute claims including unsuitability, selling away, fraud, churning, switching, and private placement due diligence. We also handle employment matters involving claims of wrongful termination, discrimination, violation of restrictive covenants, and misappropriation of trade secrets.
class action defense
The Class Action Litigation Group at Tucker Ellis has extensive experience defending class claims in jurisdictions throughout the United States. We defend class actions that corporate clients face with their customers, employees, investors, shareholders, and regulators. Our class action practice reaches across the major substantive areas of the law, including antitrust, securities, business tort, consumer finance, consumer fraud, contract, insurance, employment, ERISA, and other fields.
commercial lending litigation and workouts
Tucker Ellis trial lawyers partner with our experienced business banking lawyers to assist bank clients when litigation arises from commercial lending, servicing, default, workouts, and collection efforts. We align our litigation strategy with our clients’ objectives of preserving collateral, ensuring adequate security, and maximizing recovery if a workout cannot be achieved. We also defend and prosecute claims and/or counterclaims by commercial borrowers, which often involve fraud and misrepresentation allegations arising from the original loan transaction and loan servicing. At all stages of these matters, we work with our clients to assess, balance, and manage litigation costs against the likelihood of recovery.
consumer financial services litigation
As a law firm with offices in states that experienced record numbers of residential foreclosures during the Great Recession, we monitor emerging consumer financial services litigation trends as they begin to appear in daily case filings. Identifying and deconstructing these trends allows us to develop defense strategies that can be replicated and modified throughout the country. We are well situated to defend individual claims and class actions alike, whether they involve cutting-edge theories of liability and damages or routine consumer claims.
Our experience defending consumer claims is both diverse and deep. It includes defending claims arising from mortgage servicing and loan modification, default servicing, property preservation, lender-placed insurance, and mortgage fraud. We also defend claims authorized by state and federal laws and regulations governing the financial services industry, including consumer credit laws (e.g., the Truth in Lending Act, Fair Credit Reporting Act, Real Estate Settlement Procedures Act, Fair Housing Act, Equal Credit Opportunity Act, and Fair Debt Collection Practices Act); financial elder abuse; fair and responsible lending claims and investigations; federal and state unfair, deceptive, or abusive acts or practices (UDAAP) claims; credit card products; add-on credit products; and credit disclosure claims.
In addition to defending private plaintiff claims, we defend clients in consumer protection suits brought by state attorneys general and other government actors. We track coordinated multi-state attorneys general investigations and monitor litigation brought by individual and groups of state attorneys general to identify potential threats to our clients – first, in an effort to avoid suit, and second, in preparing to defend them.
securities and accounting fraud litigation
Securities and accounting fraud allegations must be treated with the utmost sensitivity, realistically assessed, and defended consistently within clients’ business and legal objectives. Tucker Ellis defends these high-stakes claims with cross-functional teams of trial and securities regulatory lawyers. When necessary, lawyers from the firm’s White Collar Criminal Defense & Corporate Investigations Group become involved.
We represent public companies, closely held businesses, private equity investors, and entrepreneurial ventures in the securities litigation context. We also represent investment management firms, including broker-dealers, investment advisers, and investment funds in dealing with regulatory and investor litigation. Our clients benefit from our work across multiple practice groups, navigating the federal and state securities regulatory frameworks and closely monitoring the SEC’s ever-changing reporting rules and regulations, including those mandated by the JOBS Act and the Dodd-Frank Act. This comprehensive approach facilitates a coordinated defense of regulatory inquiries, threatened and pending litigation, parallel government investigations, and criminal charges.
In certain cases, we prosecute securities, accounting fraud, and related claims on behalf of corporate or institutional investors and individual or activist shareholders. Our trial lawyers have substantial experience, both in the private and public sectors, successfully investigating and prosecuting such claims.
corporate fiduciary and shareholder disputes
Leadership, ownership, and financial disputes arise even among the closest family members, friends, and business partners. Tucker Ellis trial lawyers are prepared to move quickly to protect shareholder rights. We prosecute and defend claims against companies, officers, directors, managers, and majority or minority shareholders in closely held corporate litigation. This litigation often includes claims that officers, directors, or shareholders breached an operating agreement; breached their fiduciary duty; withheld books and records; failed to disclose information material to shareholder approval of a merger or acquisition; undervalued the company or its shares; engaged in self-dealing; overcompensated themselves; misappropriated trade secrets; or failed to act in the company’s best interests.
Our trial lawyers act quickly to seek or oppose temporary and preliminary injunctive relief designed to protect company and shareholder interests and assets. We are prepared, at a moment’s notice, to pursue or defend motions for emergency injunctive relief, immediate disclosure of company books and records, and expedited discovery. When necessary, we press for a consolidated trial on the merits to quickly bring a case to conclusion. Our demonstrated ability to try a shareholder case on short notice, in any forum, involving any issue, no matter the complexity, can foreshorten litigation and lead to an expedited resolution through a negotiated settlement or a judicial decision.
trust litigation
Tucker Ellis trial lawyers in the Financial Services Litigation Group partner with the firm’s highly skilled estates and trusts lawyers to represent trustees and fiduciaries in litigation involving high net-worth individuals, beneficiaries, banks, and trust companies. In our capacity as trial counsel for beneficiaries and trustees, we prosecute and defend claims including breach of fiduciary duty, breach of the duty of loyalty, improper or unsuitable investment of trust assets, theft of trust assets, contested accountings, fraudulent transfers, beneficiary disputes concerning distributions, and disputed creditor claims. These financial claims commonly arise simultaneously with non-financial claims for judicial construction and modification of wills and trusts, a declaration of incapacity or undue influence, elder abuse, denial of adequate medical care, or conservatorships and guardianships.
Claims arising from trust management and fiduciary decision-making, among other issues, often present interrelated tax, real estate, corporate, securities, and insurance questions that must be resolved concurrently with litigation. We have deep practice experience in each of these additional areas to provide comprehensive legal services to trustees and beneficiaries before, during, and after litigation concludes.