Fordham Law alumnus Todd Cosenza ’98 has been named Litigator of the Week by The American Lawyer. Cosenza, a partner at Willkie Farr & Gallagher, recently won a multibillion-dollar Lehman Brothers litigation trial.
When the nearly decade-long proceedings in the Lehman Brothers bankruptcy finally went to trial last year, investors who said they were hurt by the bank’s collapse wanted to pick $11.4 billion off the bones of its estate.
But a team led by Willkie Farr & Gallagher partner Todd Cosenza representing the plan administrators for Lehman lowballed the trustees by $9 billion, arguing that the fair and reasonable payout for all creditors was $2.38 billion.
And after slogging through a grueling, 23-day estimation trial spread over three months, in which the parties pored over thousands of loan files underlying residential mortgage-backed securities—an experience that U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Shelley Chapman of the Southern District of New York said was “one of the most difficult, if not the most difficult, thing I have ever done” —the judge sided with Cosenza and his team.