J. Brandon Walker

Bragar Eagel & Squire, P.C. is a litigation boutique providing our clients with personal service. Our clients know that we will use our extensive and wide experience to pursue their cases vigorously. We have excelled at litigating complex actions in any venue and focus our practice on corporate law litigation, including shareholders’ rights, derivative actions, and federal securities claims. We also have robust practices litigating consumer class actions, antitrust, real estate, bankruptcy, and general commercial litigation.

We have developed wide-ranging expertise, from litigating complex Master Limited Partnership transactions, to consumer promotions, to real estate disputes. Our attorneys have many decades of experience representing investors and consumers in litigation on a national and local level. We work with each client to understand his, her, or its unique needs and develop the proper strategy to obtain our client’s goals. This has not gone unnoticed by the courts that we practice before:

“Lead Counsel brought a particular blend of expertise, initiative, and ingenuity to the case. In my view, few litigation teams could have achieved this result against the determined, well-represented, and aggressive adversaries that Lead Counsel faced.” In re Activision Blizzard Inc. Stockholders Litigation, 124 A.3d 1025 (Del. Ch. 2015).

Activision was a Delaware Court of Chancery action that resulted in a $275 million derivative settlement on the eve of trial, we believe the largest monetary settlement of a derivative action in the history of the Court of Chancery. The settlement also provided significant corporate governance benefits to the class of stockholders.

We’ve also enjoyed recent successes in Gerber v. Enterprise Products Holdings LLC and In re El Paso Pipeline Partners, L.P. Derivative Litigation, both in the Delaware Court of Chancery. In In re El Paso Pipeline Partners, L.P. Derivative Litigation, we prosecuted claims on behalf of El Paso Pipeline Partners, L.P., a public Master Limited Partnership, against its general partner and its sponsor, El Paso Corporation (now merged into Kinder Morgan, Inc.). The claims arise out of the 2010 “drop down” of certain assets to the partnership. We successfully tried the matter in November 2014, and the court recently entered judgment for over $100 million, plus interest. The decision is reported at In re El Paso Pipeline Partners, L.P. Derivative Litig., 2015 Del. Ch. LEXIS 116 (Del. Ch. April 20, 2015) and is on appeal.

In Gerber, our client alleged that the general partner’s approvals of certain transactions were done in bad faith and in breach of the implied covenant of good faith and fair dealing. After the trial court dismissed the complaint, we prevailed before the Delaware Supreme Court to reinstate the claims for breach of the implied covenant. The matter settled for $12.4 million, payable to the unaffiliated unitholders. The decision is reported at Gerber v. Enterprise Products Holdings LLC, 67 A.3d 400 (2012).

In the area of consumer class actions, we recently announced a settlement in the long-standing “Camel Cash” litigation against R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Co., pending in the United States District Court for the Central District of California. In 2009, we brought claims on behalf of a class of consumers who participated in Reynolds’s “Camel Cash” consumer loyalty program. We alleged that Reynolds breached its contract with each participant when, in October 2006, it announced that the program would end in six months but immediately stopped offering non-tobacco merchandise for “C-Notes” collected by consumers. We obtained an important opinion from the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, which rejected defendant’s argument that the Camel Cash consumer loyalty program was merely an advertisement. In December 2014, the district court certified a class of California consumers, and after discovery, the parties agreed to settle the action. In the settlement, Reynolds agreed to provide class members the opportunity to redeem their C-Notes for non-tobacco merchandise. Relevant decisions are reported at Sateriale v. R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Co., 697 F.3d 777 (9th Cir. 2012); Sateriale v. R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Co., 2014 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 176862 (C.D. Cal. Dec. 19, 2014); and Sateriale v. R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Co., 2014 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 176858 (C.D. Cal. Dec. 19, 2014).

Currently, we are representing nine European investment managers in individual securities fraud actions pursuant to English law against BP p.l.c. related to the Deepwater Horizon disaster on April 20, 2010 in In re BP p.l.c. Securities Litigation, 4:10-md-2185 (S.D. Tex.), among numerous other cases we are pursuing on behalf of our clients.