OUR FIRM

Our lawyers have decades of experience representing plaintiffs in thorny financial and commercial disputes.

WHO WE ARE

Grais & Ellsworth is a specialized plaintiff-side litigation firm in New York City. The firm analyzes troubling financial practices, devises claims for those who are damaged by such practices, and then prosecutes those claims on their behalf in federal and state courts around the country.

Soon after the firm was founded in March 2007, we began to analyze the then-booming sales of residential mortgage-backed securities. We were one of the first firms to do so. We developed intellectually sound theories of both securities and contractual claims related to RMBS. Soon after we filed those claims, our complaints were widely copied – sometimes nearly verbatim – by other law firms. We have since prosecuted 37 actions in nine different cities on behalf of buyers of RMBS and held our own against more than 15 of the nation’s largest and best law firms simultaneously. The theories that we devised nearly a decade ago have stood up well. We have defeated dozens of motions to dismiss and for summary judgment and recovered billions of dollars in damages for our clients.

While continuing our work on RMBS, the firm is now focusing also on another troubling financial practice, trustees investing assets of their trusts in their own poorly-performing mutual funds. Many trustees have very poor records as asset managers. It is hard to see how a trustee acting solely in the interests of its beneficiaries and not in its own interest could invest assets of a trust in its own managed funds rather than in those of much more successful managers. We are working with experts to develop new methods of analyzing historical performance data to identify trustees with records so poor that it was a violation of their fiduciary duties to invest the assets of their trusts in their own mutual funds.

WHY CLIENTS CHOOSE US

OUR RECORD OF SUCCESSFUL RESULTS

The biggest reason why clients choose us is that we have delivered such successful results for our clients in the past. The settlements that our clients have reached in the mortgage-backed securities cases have been the richest achieved by virtually any plaintiff except the Government.

ALIGNED INTERESTS

Under our fee arrangements, we prosper when our clients succeed, not by running the proverbial meter.

ALWAYS PREPARING FOR TRIAL

We devise a trial strategy for each case from its inception, not after the close of discovery, denial of summary judgment, or the setting of a trial date. Our preparedness enables clients to wait for their adversaries to blink first.

SMALL-FIRM ATTENTIVENESS, BIG-FIRM STRENGTH

We understand and have long met the imperative of serving our clients attentively. We also have the depth of legal and technological prowess to litigate the largest matters against the biggest and best defense-side firms in the country.