|
Bill Levit is the senior member of the Firm's Litigation Practice Group and is located in our Milwaukee office. His practice is quite diverse with substantial experience in all kinds of complex litigation including antitrust, securities, distributor relations, licensing, unfair competition, insolvency, insurance regulation, and coverage disputes, professional liability, intellectual property, shareholder disputes, corporate governance counseling and ADR. He formerly chaired the Firm's Litigation Practice Group, was a member of the Firm's Board of Directors and has served for over twenty years as the Firm's Loss Prevention Partner and Claims Counsel. Bill has prosecuted and defended corporate and commercial cases in Federal and state courts around the United States and before a wide variety of domestic and international arbitral tribunals. He has acted as counsel in international arbitrations in The Hague, Paris, London, Toronto, Zurich, Vienna and New York City. For many years Bill has served as an arbitrator and mediator in a broad range of matters. He regularly acts as an arbitrator and mediator through the New York-based CPR International Institute for Conflict Prevention and Resolution for whom he serves as a general panelist as well as a member of its Franchise, General Counsel and Insurance Panels. In addition, he is on the Commercial; Large, Complex Case; International and Mediation Panels of the American Arbitration Association and has acted as an arbitrator for the National Association of Securities Dealers and New York Stock Exchange as well as on an ad hoc basis. From 1984 to 1988 he was a Substitute Arbitrator on the Iran-U.S. Claims Tribunal at The Hague. He is a Fellow of and Chartered Arbitrator for the Chartered Institute of Arbitrators (London) and a member of the Swiss Arbitration Association. Before joining Godfrey & Kahn in 1983, Mr. Levit was chief legal officer of a Milwaukee-based Fortune 250 manufacturing company, a partner in a major Wall Street law firm and a United States Foreign Officer, serving in New Delhi, India. He has lectured on a wide variety of legal subjects for various organizations, including the American Bar Association, Wisconsin Corporate Practice Institute, the Practicing Law Institute, State of Wisconsin Investment Board, National Association of Corporate Directors, University of Wisconsin School of Business, American Corporate Counsel Association, the State Bars of New York, Wisconsin and California and the Seventh Circuit Bar Association. He is a contributor to the American Bar Association's Mergers and the Private Antitrust Suit: The Enforcement of Section 7 of the Clayton Act (1977), is the author of a chapter entitled "Introducion to ADR" in Winning Legal Strategies for Alternative Dispute Resolution (Aspatore Books, 2005) and co-author of an article, "Surveying the Boundaries: Overlapping State and Tribal Court Jurisdiction," June 2006 Wisconsin Lawyer.
Bill graduated from the Harvard Law School in 1967, where he was Editor-in-Chief of the Harvard International Law Journal. He graduated Phi Beta Kappa, magna cum laude from Yale University in 1960 with a degree in Asian History and received a Master's degree in International Relations from the University of California (Berkeley) in 1962. He is a member of the Bars of the States of California (1974), New York (1968) and Wisconsin (1979) and is a Past President of the Seventh Circuit Bar Association. In 2003, Bill was appointed by Governor Jim Doyle for a six-year term as a Trustee of the State of Wisconsin Investment Board, which is one of the ten largest public pension plans in the United States.
Bill is an elected member of the American Law Institute. From 2000 to 2006 he chaired the Board of Administrative Oversight of the Supreme Court of Wisconsin Office of Lawyer Regulation, which oversees the State's lawyer disciplinary system. He is a Fellow of the American Bar Foundation and the Wisconsin Law Foundation. He is a Past President of the Wisconsin Chapter of the American Society of Corporate Secretaries. Bill has chaired a number of not-for-profit boards for a variety of institutions, particularly in the health care field. He is listed under Commercial Litigation, Alternative Dispute Resolution and International Arbitration in The Best Lawyers in America and has also been listed regularly in Who's Who in America and Who's Who in American Law. He is listed in Band 1 (the highest rating) in Chambers & Partners Directory of America's Leading Business Lawyers under Litigation, and is a 2007 Wisconsin Super Lawyer (Business Litigation).
Representative Matters
Intellectual Property
Advanced Software Design Corp., et al. v. Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, et al., 2007 WL 3352365 (E.D. Mo.). Lead counsel for three Federal Reserve Banks and Fiserv., Inc. in obtaining summary judgment dismissing all claims against the Banks and against Fiserv insofar as it allegedly infringed the plaintiffs' patents when encoding data on U.S. Treasury checks to detect fraud on the grounds only proper defendant is the U.S. Government, who must be sued in Federal Court of Claims.
|
