Hausfeld and co-counsel win Public Justice's 2019 Trial Lawyer of the Year Award

Hausfeld is proud to announce that Public Justice has honored the firm and its co-counsel with its 2019 Trial Lawyer of the Year Award for the legal team’s work on the ground-breaking Hale v. State Farm class action in the United States District Court for the Southern District of Illinois.

Hausfeld serves as one of the court-appointed class counsel in Hale, a RICO lawsuit alleging that State Farm defrauded 4.7 million policyholders out of a $1.05 billion judgment by secretly working to elect an Illinois Supreme Court justice, who, upon election, voted to overturn a jury verdict against State Farm. In August 2018, a jury was selected to hear the evidence in a highly-anticipated trial, following which a $250 million settlement was reached just before opening statements were to begin. The Court granted final approval of the settlement in December 2018, stating that “[t]he class is represented by what I would describe as an all-star group of litigators.”

In naming the Hale lawyers as Trial Lawyer of the Year, Public Justice observed that “the legal team survived motions to dismiss, certified a nationwide class, defeated multiple summary judgment motions, overcame three separate appeals to the Seventh Circuit, and secured significant pre-trial in limine victories.” According to Public Justice, “the settlement delivered immediate and significant relief to class members who had been waiting more than 20 years. And, notably, it employed a state-of-the-art distribution process that will ultimately pay nearly 1.5 million class members automatically, without the need to submit a claim form. In addition to the compensation for policyholders, the Hale team was also able to shine a spotlight on, and gain critical attention for, the problem of dark money in judicial elections.”

In addition to Hausfeld, the co-counsel team includes Clifford Law Firm, Lieff Cabraser Heimann & Bernstein LLP, Much Shelist, Thrash Law Firm, Ball Law Firm, Barrett Law Group, Pendley Baudin & Coffin LLP, Bellas & Wachowski, and Erwin Chemerinsky of UC Berkeley Law School.

Further information regarding the 2019 Public Justice’s Trial Lawyer of the Year Award can be found here.

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