Michael D Hausfeld

Michael D. Hausfeld, one of the US’s top civil litigators, is the Chairman of Hausfeld, a law firm with offices in Washington, DC., Boston, New York, San Francisco, Philadelphia, London, Berlin, Brussels, Duesseldorf, and Paris.

His career has included some of the largest and most successful class actions in the fields of human rights, discrimination and antitrust law. He has been lead counsel in a myriad of landmark and unique cases. For example, he represented Native Alaskans whose lives were affected by the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill. Later, he negotiated a then-historic $176 million settlement from Texaco, Inc. in a racial-bias discrimination case and, most recently, he has been fighting the NCAA (the US college sports governing body) to allow athletes to profit from their image and publicity rights.

In Friedman v. Union Bank of Switzerland, Michael represented a class of Holocaust victims whose assets were wrongfully retained by private Swiss banks during and after World War II. In a separate case, he also successfully represented the Republic of Poland, the Czech Republic, the Republic of Belarus, the Republic of Ukraine and the Russian Federation on issues of slave and forced labor for both Jewish and non-Jewish victims of Nazi persecution. He currently represents Khulumani and other NGOs in litigation involving the abuses under apartheid law in South Africa.

Michael also has a long record of successful litigation in the antitrust field, on behalf of individuals and classes, in cases involving monopolization, tie-ins, exclusive dealings and price fixing. He was a member of the ABA Antitrust Section’s Transition Taskforce, which advised the Obama Administration. Michael is or has been co-lead counsel in antitrust cases against manufacturers of genetically engineered foods, managed healthcare companies, bulk vitamin manufacturers, technology companies and international industrial cartels.