Built firmly on friendship

Brian and Ian met and became fast friends at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law in Manhattan, where Brian was a teaching assistant for Ian’s first-year contracts class.

Brian earned an invitation to join the Cardozo Law Review and later was elected the journal’s Managing Editor. Ian joined the Law Review later that year and then was elected Executive Editor.

Ian and Brian were both selected to work at the Innocence Project, a legal clinic dedicated to exonerating the wrongfully convicted, largely using previously unavailable DNA evidence. With a shared passion for the organization’s mission, they both played prominent roles in legal work that resulted in the exoneration of Innocence Project clients.

After graduation, Brian joined Boies, Schiller & Flexner LLP and recruited Ian to join the firm a year later. They spent the next several years working side-by side with a team of lawyers, led by David Boies, defending a Big Four accounting firm in a multi-billion malpractice case.

During that time, Ian and Brian also collaborated on pro bono matters, continuing their association with the Innocence Project. As Boies Schiller associates, they handled a number of post-conviction matters together, including a death penalty case they litigated all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Brian and Ian went their separate ways. Brian joined Schulte Roth Zabel LLP as part of its market-leading practice serving hedge funds and other private investment vehicles. At Schulte, he focused on disputes in the private fund space, becoming adept at successfully resolving such disputes in a manner that also furthered his client’s commercial objectives.

Ian later moved to Patterson Belknap Webb & Tyler LLP, where he litigated numerous high-profile residential mortgage-backed securities cases and also represented pharmaceutical and medical-device companies in arbitrations around the world.

Five years later, Ian returned to Boies Schiller, where he was elected partner in 2015. After more than a dozen years at Schulte, Brian became the general counsel of an SEC-registered investment adviser with over $2 billion in assets under management across multiple hedge funds.

Ian teamed up with other former Boies Schiller lawyers to form a high-end litigation boutique, and Brian joined the firm in 2023. Working together again after 15 years apart, but now as partners, Ian and Brian repeatedly achieved favorable results for their clients, emerging victorious in court and obtaining significant settlements where the circumstances made litigation undesirable.