A senior partner in the Litigation Department and a member of the firm's Management Committee, Leslie Gordon Fagen has litigated on behalf of both plaintiffs and defendants for more than 35 years, handling his clients’ most complex civil litigation matters.

Mr. Fagen is noted as a leading practitioner in commercial litigation by Chambers USA and The International Who's Who of Business Lawyers. He has been named by his peers in The Best Lawyers in America as a leader in the fields of “Bet-the-Company,” commercial and intellectual property litigation. He has been recognized as an "excellent trial lawyer and general counselor" in Legal 500 and a leading attorney in the competition and product liability litigation fields in Lawdragon 500.

Mr. Fagen is a Fellow of the American College of Trial Lawyers.

He has a strong track record of wins and favorable settlements at the trial and appellate levels in federal and state courts in multiple jurisdictions, and in alternative dispute resolution proceedings. Some of his illustrative case work includes:

• representation of major private equity companies and hedge funds in substantial commercial disputes concerning transactional matters and securities litigation and regulation;
• representation of major public company defendants in significant securities litigations, antitrust and transactional matters and internal investigations;
• representation of clients in major international and domestic arbitrations;
• representation of clients in the media, fashion and information services fields in intellectual property matters including trademark, copyright and licensing disputes;
• representation of major manufacturers in product liability defense work, including class action litigation in Texas, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Ohio, California, Illinois, Florida, South Carolina and Oklahoma, and the prosecution of plaintiffs’ claims relating to defective products;
• representation of clients in real estate litigation matters including appraisal arbitrations;
• representations of clients in significant trusts and estates matters; and
• a court appointment to represent all future claimants who fall victim to asbestos-related disease in connection with the Manville Personal Injury Settlement Trust.

Mr. Fagen’s major client representations have included Citigroup, Inc., Viacom Inc., JPMorgan Chase & Co., Dun & Bradstreet, Inc., American International Group, Harbinger Capital Partners, The Bank of New York Mellon, Paramount Pictures Corporation, CBS Corporation, MTV Networks, Showtime Networks, Madison Square Garden, ACNielsen & Co., The Nielsen Company, Nielsen Media Research Corporation, William Morris Endeavor Entertainment LLC, Becton Dickinson & Company, Perella Weinberg Partners LP, Hollinger International, Cognizant Corporation, Wachovia Corporation, Kohlberg & Co., Time Warner Inc., Merrill Lynch & Co., Christie’s, Lazard Fréres & Co., RRE Ventures, Amtrak, IMS Health, Polo Ralph Lauren Corporation, Liz Claiborne, Inc., Calvin Klein, Inc., The Metropolitan Transportation Authority, The New York City Transit Authority, The Long Island Rail Road, The Baan Company, The Huffington Post, Suzuki Motor Corporation, The United Bank of Kuwait, Kate Spade, Inc., Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia, Inc., Michael Kors (USA), Inc., Veronis Suhler Stevenson, Phorm, Inc., HEB and Hochschild Mining plc.

His work on behalf of ACNielsen & Co. and other clients was profiled in an American Lawyer cover story, “The Lifesavers,” in which Paul, Weiss was selected as the best litigation firm in the United States.

Mr. Fagen has served as co-chair of the firm’s Litigation Department, and currently serves as a member of the firm's Management Committee and as Chairman of the Partnership Committee.

He is an adjunct lecturer in law at Columbia Law School, where he teaches a trial advocacy course, and an adjunct professor of law at Brooklyn Law School, where he teaches an intellectual property litigation course. Mr. Fagen is an Associate Fellow, Berkeley College, Yale University.

He is a member of the Association of the Bar of the City of New York, and has served on several Bar committees, including Committees on the Judiciary, State Legislation and Transportation, and International Bar Association. He has been a member of the American Bar Association and the New York State Bar Association Section of Commercial and Federal Litigation, where he served as chairman of the Committee on Magistrate Judges.

Mr. Fagen is a director of the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under Law. He has served as President and Vice Chairman of The Educational Alliance, Inc., a multi-disciplinary social service agency, and as a member of the Board of Trustees of Maimonides Medical Center.

He has been a David Rockefeller Fellow (2009-2010) at the Partnership for New York City.

Mr. Fagen is the author of numerous publications on intellectual property, product liability and arbitration. He is also the author of a monograph on the life of the firm’s late patriarch Judge Simon H. Rifkind published in The Yale Biographical Dictionary of American Law. Ed. Roger K. Newman. New Haven, CT. Yale University Press, 2009. 459.

Mr. Fagen is a member of The Century Association.