Firm Leading Musk Pay Lawsuit Taps Retired Partner for Rebuild

The Manhattan law firm behind some of the country’s largest shareholder suits is bringing back a retired partner after a wave of exits.

Mark Lebovitch, who helped Bernstein Litowitz become a premier player in shareholder disputes, is rejoining the firm a little more than two years after leaving to teach part-time. His return comes on the heels of a group of Bernstein Litowitz lawyers bolting from the corporate governance group Lebovitch founded in 2006.

“For the past two years, I traded the courtroom for the classroom, merger-related investing and volunteer work,” Lebovitch said in a statement. “Last week, the mission of helping in the renewal and strengthening of the department I built for nearly two decades suddenly emerged.”

Bernstein Litowitz Berger & Grossmann is known for leading massive shareholder cases involving companies such as Walmart Inc., Paramount Global, and Coinbase Global Inc. Its lawyers successfully challenged Elon Musk’s $55.8 billion dollar Tesla Inc. pay package, a ruling that fueled efforts to overhaul Delaware’s corporate laws. The firm’s $345 million fee for its work on the case is currently tied up in an appeal.

Lebovitch spent nearly two decades at Bernstein Litowitz, building the corporate governance department from scratch after arriving from Wall Street’s Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom. He taught as an adjunct law professor at Columbia University after leaving the firm.

Veteran litigator Jeroen van Kwawegen last week led a group of Bernstein Litowitz lawyers, including at four partners from the corporate governance group, who jumped ship to launch a rival boutique. Van Kwawegen said he left over a “fundamentally different vision about what the law firm should look like,” such as its willingness to fight cases all the way through trial. Bernstein Litowitz responded by saying that the firm had fired van Kwawegen for “misconduct.”