Overview
Locke Lord Bissell & Liddell attorneys represent Fortune 500, small and medium-size companies, closely-held and family-owned businesses, Internet startups and individual entrepreneurs which operate in a wide variety of industries, including finance, manufacturing, health care, insurance, pharmaceuticals, transportation and e-commerce. In addition, many of our attorneys spend a great deal of their time representing financial institutions in virtually every type of legal controversy and have won pioneering victories in class actions, usury, lender liability, as well as cases brought under federal, state, and regulatory lending laws and regulations.
Locke Lord has hundreds of lawyers in our offices nationwide who concentrate in trial and appellate work. We help in all major areas of law that directly impact business clients, including contract, employment, environmental, fraud, antitrust, tax, technology, trademark, securities, intellectual property, class action defense, insolvency, insurance and reinsurance, and most other types of disputes. We defend securities fraud cases, proxy contests, and injunction cases, which often require litigation in multiple locations simultaneously. Our clients include national and regional investment banks and broker/dealers, securities issuers and underwriters, corporate officers and directors, corporate accountants, and bond rating agencies.
Whether clients need counseling, mediation, arbitration, or aggressive litigation, our experience, skills, and resources help meet any challenge. Our attorneys try cases in federal, state, and local courts across the country and represent clients before state and federal agencies, including the Federal Trade Commission and U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. We arbitrate disputes in private proceedings and before organizations such as the American Arbitration Association, International Chamber of Commerce, NASD, and NYSE.
Our attorneys have the experience and judgment to guide clients through government investigations and regulatory proceedings. Working closely with our corporate partners, we help manage day-to-day relations with analysts, shareholders, and others and routinely assist with what information to disclose and when. We help with offering documents, press releases, annual and quarterly reports, analyst presentations, insider trading rules and other securities compliance issues.
Our focused defense of consumer class action and lender liability claims puts us at the forefront in litigation strategies. Partly because of the success of tort reform efforts in many states, plaintiff lawyers target financial services companies with numerous consumer class action claims. Our active class action case-load has us actively defending these claims throughout the country.
Our class action representation includes insurance companies, banks, mortgage companies, financial information providers, credit bureaus, investment banks, securities brokers, nationwide retailers, and auto dealer associations. The claims against them have been made under the Real Estate Settlement Procedures Act, usury laws, debt collection statutes, insurance rules, deceptive trade practices acts, discriminatory lending rules, and fair lending rules. Locke Lord attorneys also have experience defending against class action claims based on allegations of actuarial improprieties, churning, investor suitability standards violations and securities fraud, federal preemption rules, and regulatory agency claims against officers and directors. In addition, Locke Lord has defeated a parade of class action cases on behalf of one of the nation's largest cellular telephone companies.
Locke Lord trial and appellate attorneys also possess significant antitrust experience. Antitrust issues require attorneys with an extensive knowledge of business, economic analysis, and law. Our attorneys have demonstrated their skills by litigating price-fixing, dealer-termination, price discrimination, refusal to deal, and other antitrust cases. We can act as a courtroom advocate, a negotiator working with antitrust enforcement agencies, or as counsel on the antitrust implications of business plans. Businesses often find antitrust questions emerging as they make decisions on how to deal with customers, suppliers and competitors. We help design and execute antitrust compliance programs and help with the antitrust implications of price restraints, territorial and customer restrictions, licenses, supply agreements, dealer terminations, and other competitive strategies. Antitrust actions are often brought by competitors or customers seeking an advantage in the courtroom that they cannot achieve in the marketplace. Locke Lord attorneys commonly handle difficult, complex, and high-stakes antitrust disputes and government investigations. As national antitrust counsel for many companies, we regularly appear before the Department of Justice, Federal Trade Commission, and state antitrust enforcement agencies, as well as in federal and state courts.
Intellectual property is at the core of a financial institution’s operations, and our attorneys have vast experience representing their technology needs. We handle trademark disputes, infringement claims, technology and software development and licensing, and online banking and payments systems. Our experience includes computer services contracts, data processing outsourcing, system integration agreements, and hardware purchase and lease agreements.
Locke Lord attorneys practice in bankruptcy courts throughout the United States and counsel banks, savings institutions and other financial institutions nationwide as secured and unsecured creditors and as trustees in bankruptcy liquidation and reorganization proceedings. We serve as counsel for committees of secured and unsecured creditors, which often include banks and other financial institutions. Our bankruptcy and financial services attorneys work together to represent lenders in loan workouts, debtor-in-possession financing, bankruptcy protection planning and debtor bankruptcies.
We often represent institutions serving as trustees for bonds and other debt instruments when the users or borrowers have defaulted and sought protection under bankruptcy laws. Our attorneys also represent banking and lending clients in a wide range of cases involving real estate developers, apartment owners and managers, airlines, oil and gas companies, drilling contractors, manufacturers, retailers, automobile dealerships, and others.
Integrating modern technology and litigation techniques allows our attorneys to achieve the fastest and most effective results. We collaborate with clients on the best legal strategy, never losing sight of their business objectives or budget and customizing our approach for each case. When appropriate, we integrate our information systems with our clients’ systems and employ computerized document and data retrieval systems in discovery.