Sheldon Elsen - email

Sheldon Elsen, a founder and senior partner, is well known nationally and internationally for securities and international litigation, and for handling complex commercial situations.

He has served as an Assistant U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, is a Fellow of the American College of Trial Lawyers, a former Vice President of the Association of the Bar of the City of New York, a member of the American Law Institute, and an Adjunct Professor of Law at Columbia Law School. He is also an arbitrator and mediator with JAMS.

He has represented numerous businesses, including such American companies as General Motors and PepsiCo, and executives from McDonnell-Douglas, J.C. Penney and Prudential Securities, such foreign companies as Grolsch Beer (Holland), Phillips (Holland and the U.S.), MBf Holdings (Malaysia and Singapore), and executives from the Daily Mirror (Great Britain) and Rudolf Wolff & Co. (Great Britain), as well as smaller companies, stockholders and other individuals. Several law firms and lawyers have been his clients.

In securities law, he has published several articles and frequently served on panels of experts. The Association of the Bar of the City of New York picked him as its representative to testify before both the Senate and House Committees of Congress on the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995, a major overhaul of federal securities law.

In international law, he has had extensive experience in transnational disputes, both in the U.S. and abroad, and has published on procedural problems of such litigation. The American Law Institute named him an American adviser for its project, undertaken together with the European Union's UNIDROIT, to create principles and rules for transnational litigation. He has appeared in the German courts, in German, in which he is fluent, and in Swiss arbitration, in French, in which he is also fluent. He has a working knowledge of four other languages.

Lawsuits he has handled have frequently involved complex commercial situations, and in New York's fiscal crisis he was selected as chief counsel by a commission appointed by New York's Governor to deal with the role of public authorities. He also served as chair of a committee created at the request of New York City's Mayor to deal with problems involving real estate developers.

Part of his practice is in the field of white collar crime. As an Assistant U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, he prosecuted major securities, tax and commercial cases, and later successfully defended some notorious cases, including a unanimous victory in the U.S. Supreme Court, Bronston v. United States, which is the leading case on perjury. In the U.S. Supreme Court's landmark decision, Miranda v. Arizona, both the majority and the dissent cited and drew on an article co-authored by Mr. Elsen. He has also taught criminal law at Columbia Law School.

In addition to his election as its Vice President, he has chaired committees on the federal courts and federal legislation for the Association of the Bar of the City of New York. He co-chaired the ABA task force on securities arbitration. He has served on the pro bono access to justice committee of the American College of Trial Lawyers, and he has personally tried a major pro bono case. New York's Appellate Division appointed him to a committee that deals with lawyers' disciplinary cases, where he served as a hearing panel chair.

Mr. Elsen was educated at Princeton, took a master's degree at Harvard, where he served as a Woodrow Wilson Fellow and tutor at Dunster House, and then earned his law degree at Harvard Law School. Alongside his practice, he has served for many years as Adjunct Professor of Law at Columbia Law School, where he has taught various seminars and a course in the field of litigation. He has published many articles in law reviews, the legal press and such publications as Fortune, and is periodically consulted by the media for comments on legal developments. He is listed in Best Lawyers in America, Who's Who in America, and in Best Lawyers in New York in New York Magazine, as well as in other directories.

Mr. Elsen and his late wife, the former Gerri Sharfman, had two children, a daughter who is a public-interest lawyer and a son who is an editor at the New York Times.

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