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Jonathan Watkins is Head of Corporate and Financial Services Litigation and past Co-Chair of Global Litigation. He handles a broad array of high-stakes commercial disputes, with particular focus on financial services, securities, M&A, antitrust, and technology litigation. Mr. Watkins frequently leads matters that span multiple venues and present novel and complex questions of law. Many of his matters have a regulatory dimension, and he frequently provides fiduciary duty and other transaction-related advice. Mr. Watkins sits on the Advisory Board of the Harvard Program on Corporate Governance and has been recognized by several publications, including The Legal 500 US, The Best Lawyers in America, and Lawdragon’s 500 Leading Global IP Lawyers and 500 Leading Litigators in America.
Mr. Watkins has handled high-profile cases in the financial services arena for twenty years. His early career included defending Credit Suisse from the $40 billion securities claims that stemmed from the collapse of Enron; Merrill Lynch’s independent directors in shareholder suits over the Bank of America merger; and Credit Suisse and Deutsche Bank at trial in the $15 billion litigation over the failed Hexion-Huntsman merger. More recently, he represented a leading national bank in disputes and government inquiries over alleged manipulation of interest-rate benchmarks, several state-chartered banks in regulatory and private civil litigation, and J.P. Morgan Chase in CMBS-related litigation.
Mr. Watkins also leads mission-critical matters for private credit clients, including in creditor-rights and lender-liability disputes. He is lead counsel for Advantage Capital Holdings LLC in the widely reported civil RICO and lender-liability litigation pending in the Southern District of New York.
Mr. Watkins’ securities, M&A, and corporate governance practice also spans several other industries. He recently represented Thoma Bravo in an M&A dispute that led to the repricing of its $10.4 billion acquisition of Anaplan; George Economou’s Sphinx Investment Corp. in challenges to stock issuances that disenfranchised public stockholders; the founders of a leading cryptocurrency exchange in M&A, antitrust, and commodities disputes; and the former CEO of SCANA in securities, RICO, and shareholder derivative litigation stemming from the company’s abandonment of its $13 billion nuclear-power project.
Another focus of Mr. Watkins’ practice is representing technology-intensive companies in their most sensitive and important matters. He has represented Renaissance Technologies, the statistical-arbitrage fund, in litigation to protect its trade secrets; Rubicon Global in nationwide competition suits against incumbent oligopolists; Hyland Software in several patent cases over machine learning; and Qualcomm in industry-shaping competition and patent-licensing disputes with Nokia and Broadcom. He now represents Zemcar in trade secret and business-tort litigation against Uber.
Several of Mr. Watkins’ matters have involved professional sports teams and leagues, including his representations of:
- Georgia Angelos in litigation over control of the Baltimore Orioles;
- a major corporate sponsor in matters related to COVID-19’s impact on professional sports leagues (including the NFL, MLB, NBA, NHL, and PGA Tour) and the 2022 Qatar World Cup; and
- Advantage Capital Holdings in expedited proceedings that paved the way for the 2024 sale of Everton F.C.
Mr. Watkins also maintains an active appellate practice. He has prevailed on several constitutional challenges to state action, including on North Carolina’s attempted taking of Asheville’s water system; a banking trade association’s First Amendment challenge to New Jersey’s campaign finance restrictions; and a trust’s due process and dormant-commerce-clause challenges to a state’s taxation of foreign trusts. Mr. Watkins has also argued appeals presenting issues of statutory interpretation, federal jurisdiction, or both, and he has authored Supreme Court amicus briefs for Erwin Chemerinsky in Crawford v. Marion County Election Board, a Voter ID case, and for Qualcomm in Quanta Computer, the seminal patent exhaustion case.
Mr. Watkins graduated magna cum laude from Fordham University School of Law, where he earned the Fordham Law School Prize, served on the Fordham Law Review, and was elected to the Order of the Coif. He received his undergraduate degree in Chemical Engineering from Lehigh University.
Mr. Watkins began his career at Cravath, Swaine & Moore LLP, joined Cadwalader in 2018, and is resident in Cadwalader’s New York and Charlotte offices.
