Experience

Peter is a partner in the Business Litigation Group. Peter focuses his practice on complex financial litigation, including securities litigation and corporate restructuring and bankruptcy-related adversary proceedings. Peter also advises clients on ediscovery, document preservation, document collection, and document review strategies and best practices, and helps his clients implement defensible, efficient, and effective ediscovery procedures.

Most recently, Peter represented a Bankruptcy Trustee in a long running case (Douglas A. Kelley in Kelley v. BMO Harris Bank, N.A.) that ultimately resulted in a $564 million jury verdict – the largest jury verdict in Minnesota history – at trial in Federal Court in Minnesota. The case arose out of one of the biggest Ponzi schemes in U.S. history involving Tom Petters. Petters was convicted and sentenced to 50 years in prison for fraud using accounts held at M&I Bank, which was acquired in 2011 by BMO Harris Bank. The jury found that BMO aided and abetted breaches of fiduciary duty by Petters and his cohorts in using a checking account to launder nearly $74 billion in Ponzi scheme proceeds. The jury awarded $484 million in compensatory damages and nearly $80 million in punitive damages. With the addition of prejudgment interest, the total recovery against the bank could increase to over $1 billion.

Peter also recently helped secure a $28 million dollar settlement for the Receiver for the Education Corporation of America (“ECA”), a for-profit education company, in a case against ECA’s former officers and directors for their alleged breaches of fiduciary duties to ECA.

Peter was co-lead counsel for Regis, LLC in a complex commercial real estate dispute against Regis’ landlord. Peter and the Regis-team recently won partial judgment on the pleadings for Regis, which required the landlord to pay Regis the entire seven figure damages award sought in the complaint. The order granting partial judgment on the pleadings can be found here.

Peter also represented U.S. Bank in a multi-billion dollar case brought by the People of the State of California for alleged unfair competition related to foreclosed properties held in RMBS trusts. Peter’s work on this matter included both defending against the Plaintiff’s claims, as well as bringing third party indemnification claims against several large mortgage servicers that serviced the properties at issue. The plaintiff sought billions of dollars in fines and a permanent injunction that would have fundamentally changed the way securitized mortgages are administered. The case settled just before trial on favorable terms, including without agreeing to any formal injunctive relief and paying less than 1% of the monetary relief claimed by the plaintiff at the outset of the case.