New York City demands the best. The economic capital of the world and home to more corporate headquarters than any city in America, New York has no tolerance for any law firm’s B team. A multi-disciplinary and global firm, O’Melveny has no B team. Every day our New York office counsels a diverse array of sophisticated clients about high stakes litigation and transformative deals. Our clients include the biggest financial organizations and the most innovative energy companies, pioneering life sciences companies, leading transportation corporations, and multinational manufacturers.
These supercharged clients hire O’Melveny not only because of our reputation for taking on the most important, most challenging, and seemingly unwinnable cases, but also because that reputation is well-earned: We do handle those cases and we do win a lot of them. Described by clients as a firm with “exceptionally high-quality lawyers” committed to “real service, partnership, and care for clients,” O’Melveny is a perennial honoree in the industry’s leading legal guides and global directories, including Chambers and The Legal 500.
Our world-class Litigation Department has distinguished itself in the most competitive legal ground in the country. We have a long and distinguished history in the Second Circuit, in the Southern and Eastern Districts, in the New York State Court of Appeals, and in other courts of the State of New York. We are national leaders in securities and financial institution litigation, white collar defense and regulatory enforcement, intellectual property, data privacy and cybersecurity, labor and employment, insurance, antitrust, and appellate litigation.
These are just some of the cases O’Melveny’s New York litigators have handled in the past year: We secured a jury-trial victory for Chubb Group against Madelaine Chocolate Novelties in a $47 million coverage dispute arising from Hurricane Sandy damage; we obtained dismissal for a Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley–led underwriting syndicate in securities litigation arising from the IPO of DiDi Global, an online ride-hailing platform.
O’Melveny’s New York–based pro bono program has been on the front page too. In a landmark trial victory in collaboration with the Public Interest Law Center of Philadelphia and the Education Law Center of Pennsylvania, an O’Melveny team convinced a judge that the Pennsylvania state constitution requires the equitable distribution of education resources for all children—and that the state was not meeting this standard.
Another New York team recently won acquittal in a retrial in New Orleans for a man who had served more than eight years in prison for second-degree murder. He had been sentenced to life without parole in 2016 after 10 of 12 jurors found him guilty. At the time, Louisiana and Oregon were the only states that allowed felony convictions by non-unanimous juries. In 2019, an O’Melveny pro bono team convinced the US Supreme Court that the Sixth Amendment requires unanimous convictions for both state and federal juries. The victory struck down Jim Crow–era policies crafted to disenfranchise Black defendants—and opened the door for new trials for those convicted by non-unanimous panels. And in one of those new trials, O’Melveny won that defendant his freedom.
