September 5, 2024
A partner at Cohen Milstein, Posner has recovered billions on behalf of defrauded investors. Her cases include six of the top 100 securities fraud class action settlements of all time.
A courtroom sketch from In re Walt Disney Co. Derivative Litigation hangs on the wall in Laura Posner’s office in lower Manhattan.
The work, drawn by Andrea and Shirley Sheperd in the Delaware Court of Chancery nearly 20 years ago, was Posner’s first-ever case—and trial.
Posner, representing the plaintiffs, alleged that a $140 million severance payout to outgoing Disney president Michael Ovitz was a waste of assets and constituted various breaches of contractual and fiduciary duties.
“It was an extremely difficult trial,” Posner recalled. “It was a veritable who’s who of Big Law in the courthouse for the defendants every single day.”
While the defense had dozens of bold-faced legal names, Posner said her team typically had two people at bat daily, switching off to prep the witnesses for the next day.
Posner recounted the case to the New York Law Journal in response to a question about her first win in the courtroom. But she didn’t win that case.
“I think it was a 70-page decision,” she said. “If you read 69 of those pages,…you would have thought we won. And then you get to the last page, and we lost.”
“It was a very hard blow,” she explained. “It’s never fun to lose, but it was a hard blow because I firmly believe that what the Disney company did was not appropriate, that it was corporate waste and that it should have been the kind of behavior that corporations are not supposed to engage in to the detriment of their investors and shareholders.”
Impact Litigation
But in the decades since, Posner has recovered billions on behalf of defrauded investors. Her cases include six of the top 100 securities fraud class action settlements of all time. Last year, she settled In Re Wells Fargo for a historic $1 billion.
But those who know her have made clear she’s driven not by money or rankings, but by true passion to affect meaningful outcomes for the greater good.
Prior to joining Cohen Milstein Sellers & Toll in 2017 as a partner, Posner served as the Bureau Chief for New Jersey’s Bureau of Securities—the top securities enforcer and regulator in the state.
Chad Johnson, now a partner at Robbins Geller Rudman & Dowd, worked with Posner at Bernstein Litowitz Berger & Grossman. He also served as her counterpart in New York during the same period Posner was securities regulator for NJ.
“She knows the law and the cases cold,” Johnson said. “But beyond that, she brings to all these cases a level of passion and commitment that is something unique. She’s always looking for new ways to advance cases in the interest of the public.”
“And in the private sector you just don’t see that everyday,” he added.
Posner grew up in the Bay Area, completing her undergraduate degree at UCLA (magna cum laude) and then earning her J.D. from Harvard Law School.
She then moved to New York, and still lives in Manhattan with her husband, who works in education, and their young son.
Posner went to law school thinking she would go into civil rights litigation at the Department of Justice.
But when it came time, the DOJ under the then-new George W. Bush administration wasn’t prioritizing that kind of work, Posner recalled. She tried non-profits, but found that a lot of the job was not as legal as she might have hoped. For example, fixing a broken copier.
“I had a professor who introduced me to the world of plaintiffs class action firms,” she said, referencing Harvard Law’s Jon D. Hanson. “I was really interested in the kind of impact litigation, a lot of which was getting farmed out on the nonprofit stage, to other firms to litigate.”
She began as a summer associate at Millberg, later returning as an associate. And there she discovered the impact of shareholder derivative litigation.
“Along the way I came to a kind of realization that ensuring that people have a financial ability that withstands the ups and downs of life, they have to have a secure retirement,” Posner shared. “That people having the money to pay for everyday necessities was absolutely as crucial to ensuring everyone had equal rights in this country as anything else.”
Capt. Sean Coffey is now general counsel for the U.S. Navy, but he clearly recalls when Posner arrived at Bernstein Litowitz in the early 2000s. A senior partner then, Coffey said it was clear that the new hire “was a future leader of the plaintiffs bar.”
“She had a great sense of humor and a really great bullshit detector,” he said. “She didn’t put up with nonsense, in a good way.”
“She had outstanding judgment, just smart as a whip,” Coffey continued. “She plays well with others, she’s a very good leader. People gravitate toward her when she offers an opinion. We’re talking 20 years ago now, the smartest people in the room would stop and listen when she contributed.”
These days, Coffey said he’d be loath to go toe-to-toe with Posner.
Read PROFILE: Attorney of the Year Winner: Laura Posner of Cohen Milstein Sellers & Toll.