Boies, Schiller & Flexner celebrated 15 years in South Florida at an event in Miami on November 3. The firm established its presence in South Florida in April 2000, with a single partner, Caryl Boies, based in an office in Hollywood. Today, it has grown to more than 50 lawyers, working on big national, international, and Florida complex commercial litigation from offices in Miami and Fort Lauderdale. The firm’s national matrimonial practice is based in Hollywood.
The firm’s Miami office is headed by Stephen Zack, who was the first Hispanic American to head the American Bar Association and the Florida Bar Association. Its work focuses on product liability, complex commercial litigation, and class actions. The office counts Altria, Chevron, and DuPont among its clients, and it is currently working as co-lead counsel class action claims by car owners against Japanese airbag manufacturer Takata and other defendants.
The Miami office was formed when the Miami law firm Zack Kosnitzky, led by Mr. Zack and Michael Kosnitzky, became part of Boies, Schiller & Flexner. Mr. Zack had tried Bush v. Gore with Boies, Schiller & Flexner Chairman David Boies after the 2000 U.S. presidential election. Mr. Kosnitzky now heads the Boies, Schiller & Flexner tax practice.
The firm opened its Fort Lauderdale office in 2002, when Ms. Boies, Carl Goldfarb, Sigrid McCawley, and Stuart Singer, moved from Hollywood. The Fort Lauderdale office, headed by Mr. Singer, handles complex commercial litigation for clients including Carnival, Fresh Del Monte, and NextEra Energy, as well as a class action for investors in Bernard Madoff feeder funds. Lawyers from Fort Lauderdale have played leading roles in cases such as Halliburton Co. v. Erica P. John Fund, Anwar v. Fairfield Greenwich Limited, and the representation of a certified class of 1.7 million children seeking to enforce federal Medicaid rights in Florida.
The firm’s Hollywood office took its current form in 2007 with the acquisition of the family and matrimonial law firm Miller Schwartz & Miller, headed by James Fox Miller, with the goal of creating a national family law practice that could represent clients in the most complex and challenging family law cases in any jurisdiction, nationally or internationally. While the bulk of the firm’s family law cases have arisen in New York, Florida, and California, we have served as lead counsel, co-counsel, and consultants throughout the United States in both litigation and in the negotiation of prenuptial and other marital agreements. The firm has also developed expertise in emerging areas of family law, such as the support and dissolution of same-sex partnerships and marriages. The head of the Hollywood office is Charles Fox Miller.