JOEL S. FELDMAN is a partner in Sidley Austin's Chicago office, where he serves as Global Coordinator for the Financial Services/Consumer Class Action Practice Team.
Mr. Feldman has served as lead defense counsel in over 70 class actions venued in over 30 federal and state courts throughout the United States. These class actions have covered consumer fraud claims, annuities, ERISA benefit plans, securities, drug discount cards, life insurance, club memberships, service warranties, Fair Credit Reporting Act issues, and various other financial services products.
Mr. Feldman recently has twice won decertification of a class, having first been retained after the entry of class certification (Gregurek v. United of Omaha, Nov. 2009, C.D. Cal.); Doiron v. Conseco, April, 2009 (M.D. La.), and also won summary judgment on behalf of AXA Equitable in a national retained asset class action (Rabin v. AXA Equitable, Oct. 2009 (S.D.N.Y.). In March, 2010, Mr. Feldman won the first class certification denial challenging the practice of assisting employee transfer of 401(k) accounts into IRA's (Walsh v. Principal Financial, S.D. Iowa), and in August, 2008, Mr. Feldman served as lead counsel in the first class certification denial of an ERISA class action filed against plan providers that challenged revenue sharing. He served as lead counsel In re Industrial Life Insurance Litigation, MDL No. 1371 (E.D. La), where in 2006 the court denied class certification after almost all other defendants had settled.
Mr. Feldman co-chaired from 1998-2009 the PLI National Class Action Conference in New York. Mr. Feldman has authored numerous class action articles, including recent articles in Litigation Magazine (the official publication of the ABA Litigation Section), titled "Class Action Defense: A Practical Guide With Ethics In Mind" and BNA Class Action Reports, titled "Evidentiary and Burden of Proof Standards for Class Certification Rulings." Mr. Feldman has tried to a jury verdict a securities fraud stock drop class action, named by the National Law Journal as one of the top ten jury trials of the year.
Mr. Feldman is a 1974 graduate of Oberlin College and a 1979 graduate of the Georgetown University Law Center, where he served as Case and Note Editor for the Georgetown Law Journal. Upon graduation, Mr. Feldman clerked for the Honorable Thomas Aquinas Flannery, of the United States District Court for the District of Columbia.