Overview
Corporate success depends on the ability of senior management to achieve short-term milestones, all while implementing long-term strategic goals, balancing investors' competing interests, adapting to a rapidly evolving digital world, overcoming shifting industry dynamics, and managing global economic cycles. Despite the best efforts of competent and well-meaning directors and officers, businesses and other organizations still fail from time to time.
When companies falter, disgruntled owners, investors, creditors, and customers will often raise claims of mismanagement by senior executives and board members, particularly when insurance may be available to fund recoveries. As a result, directors and officers are common targets for breach of fiduciary duty or similar claims, particularly in bankruptcies, reorganizations, and other insolvency proceedings in which the trustee and other stakeholders are looking to hold senior management accountable.
In the midst of legal turmoil and corporate failure, directors and officers need experienced counsel to help them navigate through complex legal claims and defenses while minimizing their exposure and protecting their reputation and relationships.
Our clients benefit from Carlton Fields' multidisciplinary approach, by combining the experience of our D&O litigators with expertise from lawyers in our corporate governance, white collar, and securities and derivative litigation practices. Additionally, our property and casualty lawyers routinely handle complex coverage issues on behalf of insurers under D&O, errors and omissions (E&O), employment practices liability (EPL), and other professional liability policies.
Carlton Fields' D&O litigation team has represented individuals, corporations, majority shareholders, management teams, boards of directors, and special committees of public and privately held corporations, not-for-profit organizations, and family-owned businesses in all aspects of dispute resolution, including:
- Board advisory during financial crisis
- Pre-suit mediation
- Strategic advice and counsel
- Insolvency
- Corporate governance
- Derivative suits
- Internal investigations
Our firm lawyers are active with the ABA's Business Law Section and the Society for Corporate Governance. Our team also includes the chair of the ABA Corporate Governance Subcommittee for Business Bankruptcy, former federal prosecutors, and former SEC staff.