Biography: Commercial Litigation

A senior partner in the litigation department, Leslie Gordon Fagen has litigated on behalf of both plaintiffs and defendants for 35 years, handling his clients' most complex civil litigation matters.

Mr Fagen is recognised for his broad experience in general commercial litigation across an array of legal disciplines, including antitrust, securities, intellectual property, product liability, real estate, trusts & estates and insurance issues. He has worked extensively with Fortune 500 companies as well as private equity and hedge fund clients. He is noted as a leading attorney in commercial litigation by Chambers USA, Chambers Global, The International Who's Who of Business Lawyers and Lawdragon 500.

Mr Fagen is a Fellow of the American College of Trial Lawyers. He has a strong track record of wins and favourable settlements at the trial and appellate levels in federal and state courts across multiple jurisdictions, and in alternative dispute resolution proceedings.

Mr Fagen's major client representations have included Viacom Inc, Citigroup, American International Group, Inc, JPMorgan Chase & Co, Dun & Bradstreet, Inc, Harbinger Capital Partners, Paramount Pictures Corporation, CBS Corporation, MTV Networks, Showtime Networks, Madison Square Garden, ACNielsen, The Nielsen Company, Nielsen Media Research Corporation, Becton Dickinson & Company, Hollinger International, Cognizant Corporation, Wachovia Corporation, Kohlberg & Co, Time Warner Inc, Merrill Lynch & Co, Christie's, Lazard Frères & Co, RRE Ventures, Amtrak, IMS Health, Polo Ralph Lauren Corporation, Liz Claiborne, Inc, Calvin Klein, Inc, The Metropolitan Transportation Authority, The New York City Transit Authority, MTA Long Island Rail Road, The Baan Company, The Huffington Post, Suzuki Motor Corporation, The United Bank of Kuwait, Kate Spade, Inc, Martha Stewart, Michael Kors, Veronis Suhler Stevenson, Phorm, Inc, HEB and Hochschild Mining plc.

His work on behalf of ACNielsen & Co and other clients was profiled in a January 2006 American Lawyer cover story. 'The Lifesavers,' in which Paul, Weiss was selected as the best litigation firm in the United States.

He has served as co-chair of the firm's litigation department and as a member of the management committee, and serves as chairman of the partnership committee.

He is an adjunct lecturer in law at Columbia Law School, where he teaches a trial advocacy course, and an adjunct professor of law at Brooklyn Law School, where he teaches an intellectual property litigation course.

He is a member of the Association of the Bar of the City of New York, and has served on several bar committees, including committees on the Judiciary, State Legislation and Transportation, and International Bar Association. He has been a member of the American Bar Association and the New York State Bar Association section of commercial and federal litigation, where he served as chairman of the committee on magistrate judges.

Mr Fagen is a director of the lawyers committee for Civil Rights Under Law. He has served as president and vice chairman of The Educational Alliance, Inc, a multi-disciplinary social service agency and as a member of the board of trustees of Maimonides Medical Center.

He is a David Rockefeller Fellow (2009-2010) at the Partnership for New York City.

Mr Fagen is the author of numerous publications on intellectual property, product liability and arbitration. He is also the author of a monograph on the life of the firm's late patriarch Judge Simon H Rifkind published in The Yale Biographical Dictionary of American Law, Ed Roger K Newman, New Haven, CT, Yale University Press, 2009. 459.