We won an arbitration award valued at over $4 million in a reinsurance dispute against a Lloyd’s of London underwriter following a four-day arbitration pursuant to an ARAIS reinsurance dispute resolution provision.

Gate Five, LLC v. Beyoncé Knowles-Carter, et al., in New York State Supreme Court, New York County.  We represented a video game development company in connection with a contract dispute against pop star Beyoncé, alleging that Beyoncé had violated the terms of the parties’ contract when she abandoned work on Gate Five’s video game and attempted to withdraw a license she had previously granted for the use of her name and likeness.  Johnson Gallagher prevailed in the New York State Supreme Court, Commercial Division, against a motion to dismiss the claims at the pleading stage and a second motion to dismiss them on summary judgment.  We then defeated Beyoncé’s attempt to overturn the summary judgment decision through an appeal to the First Department (see link). The case settled through a confidential settlement agreement that the parties signed following a successful mediation. 

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MidAmerican Energy Holdings Co., et al. v. San Lorenzo Ruiz Builders & Developers Group, Inc., et al., District Court of Douglas County, Nebraska. In a dispute related to LaPrairie Group Contractors (International) Ltd. v. CE Casecnan, Ltd., et al. (discussed above), we won a judgment worth more than $100 million for a shareholder client following a four-week jury trial in Omaha, Nebraska against a subsidiary of Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway.

Our firm has a long history of success at resolving commercial disputes for clients across a broad range of industries – from financial and real estate investment to pharmaceutical licensing, structural engineering, software development, media and entertainment, and more.  Our cases often center around the types of complex legal issues that many companies find themselves facing in business disputes today, including fraud and breach of contract, royalty rights, trade secrets, restrictive covenants, unfair and deceptive trade practices, and RICO, among many others.  We are proud of our results and of the longstanding client relationships that we have forged over the years while pursuing them.  Here are some examples.

Bio-Rad Laboratories, Inc. v. Paladin III, L.P., in New York State Supreme Court, New York County.  We represented the securityholders of a life sciences company called QuantaLife, Inc. (“QuantaLife”), in a case against Bio-Rad Laboratories, Inc. (“Bio-Rad”), a large, public life sciences company that acquired QuantaLife in 2011.  The case concerned a dispute over whether the former securityholders, on the one hand, or Bio-Rad, on the other, was entitled to the proceeds of an approximately $20 million escrow fund that had been established when Bio-Rad acquired QuantaLife.  Our client alleged that Bio-Rad concocted a scheme to improperly take the escrowed funds, and the case ended when the parties entered into a confidential settlement after extensive discovery had been taken.

We won a judgment of approximately $10 million for a Russian telecommunications client following three weeks of ICC hearings.

We obtained a preliminary injunction prohibiting the expulsion of one of two operators of a prominent New York City restaurant chain by the other, leading to a confidential separation settlement agreement.

Emergent BioSolutions Inc. v. Daniel D. Adams and Manon M.J. Cox, in the United States District Court for the District of Connecticut. We successfully defended a small, independent biopharmaceutical company in a multi-pronged litigation through which a much larger pharmaceutical company sought to take control of a groundbreaking technology our client created. All of the adversary’s efforts failed, including an attempt to have our client placed into involuntary bankruptcy (see link), and our client preserved its technology, which it later sold for more than $700 million dollars. The effort to take control of the technology ended after our adversary withdrew a federal claim it had filed in response to our service of a motion for Rule 11 sanctions based on the frivolity of the claims.

Moses, et al. v. Dunlop, et al., Index No. 653412/2014 in New York State Supreme Court, New York County. In this case, we represented two of the three creators of the Real Housewives franchise of reality television shows as plaintiffs against the third creator and the network – Bravo – that airs the Real Housewives shows. The plaintiffs alleged that the defendants had failed to honor their contractual obligation to share with the plaintiffs three types of Real Housewives-associated revenue – producer fees, royalties for spin-offs, and miscellaneous sources of revenue, such as syndication fees and the proceeds of merchandise sales. The plaintiffs sought both back damages and future payments in perpetuity for each of the three categories of revenue. The parties settled the case in 2022 after our firm prevailed on the defense’s efforts to have the case dismissed based on the statute of limitations (see link, at p. 70), and on a motion in which we asked the court to order the defendants to produce certain documents that we maintained they were wrongfully withholding on the grounds of the attorney-client privilege (see link 1).

Our Clients

We represented a Mexican pharmaceutical company in an International Chamber of Commerce (“ICC”) arbitration against the U.S. subsidiary of one of the largest pharmaceutical companies in the world.  Our client alleged that, for anticompetitive purposes, its adversary was deliberately failing to perform an exclusive license that our client had obtained for the purpose of manufacturing and selling a lifesaving vaccine in Mexico.  The case ended when the parties entered into a confidential settlement on the eve of the hearings.

MidAmerican Energy Holdings Co., et al. v. San Lorenzo Ruiz Builders & Developers Group, Inc., et al., Docket 1051 No. 544. District Court of Douglas County, Nebraska. In a dispute related to LaPrairie Group Contractors (International) Ltd. V. CE Casecnan, Ltd., et al. (discussed above), we won a judgment worth more than $100 million for a shareholder client following a four-week jury trial in Omaha, Nebraska against a subsidiary of Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway.

Getty Properties Corp., various matters.  We have represented Getty in connection with a variety of disputes since the firm’s formation in 2004.  Most recently, we represented Getty in connection with a massive environmental cleanup dispute against the Russian oil giant, Lukoil, which was the parent of a company that operated hundreds of gas stations on land that Getty owned in four different states.  Getty alleged that Lukoil had engineered a scheme to stick Getty with the cost of cleaning up more than $100 million in environmental damage that Lukoil, through its control of its subsidiary, had caused at the gas stations.  We pursued claims against Lukoil arising from the environmental statutes of the states in which the gas stations were located, as well as on a piercing-the-corporate-veil theory.  The case was captioned Getty Properties Corp., et al. v. Lukoil Americas Corp., et al., New York State Supreme Court, New York County, and Lukoil sought to have the case dismissed at the outset based on various legal arguments.  We defeated Lukoil’s motion to dismiss the complaint at the trial level (see link), and also prevailed when Lukoil appealed the trial court’s decision (see link).  The case settled after Johnson Gallagher pursued and won a pivotal motion to obtain material documents that the defendants had previously withheld on privilege grounds (see link). 

​​​Prior Matters Involving Confidential Parties

​​​​​​​JOHNSON GALLAGHER LLC

Alternative fee arrangements are a mainstay of our business – we work closely with clients to create individually-tailored fee structures that align our interests with yours as we work to achieve your specific needs and goals.  In this manner, we are able to provide top-tier service while keeping performance and efficiency at the forefront of our efforts.  Some of the alternative fee structures we utilize most frequently include partial contingency, holdbacks with incentive bonus, and (on occasion) full contingency arrangements.   

LaPrairie Group Contractors (International) Ltd. v. CE Casecnan, Ltd., et al., in California State Superior Court, San Francisco County. We secured judgment for plaintiff following a five-week trial in California State Superior Court, ruling that defendants, the majority shareholders in a Philippine hydroelectric and irrigation company, had miscalculated their rate of return under a minority shareholder dilution formula contained in the parties’ shareholder agreement. The trial court awarded our client approximately $20 million in past damages and declared that our client retained its 15% ownership interest in the project, thereby entitling our client to estimated future distributions of up to an additional $100 million.

Alternative Fee Arrangements

Craveable Hospitality Group, f/k/a Watershed Ventures LLC, et al. v. Musa Tadros, et al., in the Circuit Court of Cook County, Illinois County Department, Chancery Division.  We secured a multimillion-dollar lost profits award for our client, a nationwide hospitality group, following a five-day evidentiary hearing at the Chicago offices of the American Arbitration Association (“AAA”).  Our client prevailed on claims of breach of fiduciary duty and breach of contract against a Chicago-based real estate developer, alleging that the developer, after forming a new corporate startup with our client, had acted in bad faith to divert away from the startup a lucrative opportunity to open two new Chicago restaurants with celebrity chef David Burke.  Johnson Gallagher obtained confirmation of the AAA award in Illinois state court after the respondent sought to have it vacated on the ground that he had never agreed to arbitrate.  We prevailed at the appellate level as well, when the Appellate Court of Illinois, First District, issued a 25-page decision denying respondent’s appeal and confirming the monetary judgment (see link). 

Karilin Frica Sanchez, et al. v. ASA College, Inc. et al., in the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York.  We obtained dismissal of a federal class action lawsuit on behalf of our longtime client ASA College, a New York-based private college, and several of its individual officers.  The class-action plaintiffs asserted claims under the federal RICO statute as well as New York’s General Business Law § 349 based on an alleged fraudulent scheme that they claimed ASA had engaged in for the purpose of artificially inflating its student enrollment figures and thereby obtaining unfair access to federal financial aid funds.  Johnson Gallagher successfully moved to dismiss the RICO claims at the pleading stage, after which the court declined to exercise jurisdiction over the remaining state law claims (see link).