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Online Directory | Alumni Association | Class Notes & News | Events |  Spotlights
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Alumni Services | Class of 2008 | Contact Us | Alumni & Giving Home
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Lawrence A. Sucharow ’75 Elected Chair of Labaton Sucharow
In his new role, Sucharow plays a major role in developing the litigation and settlement strategies for almost all of the class actions the firm prosecutes. He has successfully recovered more than $1 billion on behalf of institutional investors such as state, city, county and union pension funds, shareholders of public companies, and purchasers of other securities. The National Law Journal recently listed Labaton Sucharow on its "Plaintiffs' Hot List," for the second consecutive year, as one of 13 firms profiled nationwide. Several of Labaton's major cases have made the record books - including a $117.5 million settlement in In re Mercury Interactive Securities Litigation that marked the largest settlement agreement to date in an options-backdating case; and In re Natural Gas Commodity Litigation, a $101 million recovery and the second-largest to date under the Commodity Exchange Act. There have only been six or seven class action securities cases to go to verdict since 1995, when Congress passed major securities litigation reform legislation, and Labaton Sucharow has handled three of these. Sucharow, who frequently travels to countries in the European Union, says he plans to continue educating European institutions about the U.S. legal system and their right to file claims in securities actions. "It's been very rewarding to speak to people from different cultures about access to courts, which they are often denied in their own countries," he says. Sucharow began his career with a small shareholder class action firm while he was still in law school, which he attended in the evening. "I took a job as a law clerk for $125 a week," he says. "It was a cut in pay from my job managing a menswear store on Wall Street." A government hiring freeze in 1975 scuttled his dream of working for the Securities and Exchange Commission, so he stayed on with the firm after he graduated. A year later, he answered an ad for a securities class action litigator with the firm that now bears his name. A devoted and longtime supporter of the Law School, Sucharow, who graduated cum laude, says he is proud to have built such a successful practice. "I worked my way up with my colleagues to chair this firm, and I am very pleased to be doing some very good work," he says. "I am extraordinarily grateful that Brooklyn Law School had an evening program, without which I could not have gone to law school." He practices with two other distinguished Brooklyn Law School alumni - Jonathan Plasse '76 and Joel Bernstein '75 - who are now senior partners at Labaton. The firm sponsors the Labaton Sucharow LLP Scholarship, which annually funds a scholarship and internship for a first-year minority student who demonstrates academic excellence in his or her first semester. Sucharow has visited the Law School to speak to students about his successful career and says he hopes to continue educating students about the variety of plaintiffs' work that is available to lawyers. "There are more areas of contingent fee law that could enable an entrepreneurial graduate to make a very decent living," he says, naming areas such as shareholder derivative suits, products liability, mass torts, and actions where legislation has been enacted to shift fees from the loser to the winner, such as civil rights cases. "Everything is not billable clients," Sucharow notes.
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