In our first post of 2015, we wanted to congratulate our colleague and mentor, Evan Tager, for his recent recognition as a Litigation Trailblazer and Pioneer by the National Law Journal.

Evan has been at the forefront of major developments in the law—including those affecting class action and mass tort litigation.  As this profile notes, Evan has been a leader on at least two major issues.  First, he helped convince courts of the need for due process limitations on excessive punitive damages awards, ultimately prevailing in BMW of North America v. Gore.  And second—working with us and others at the firm—Evan spearheaded Mayer Brown’s efforts on behalf of AT&T to craft and enforce arbitration agreements that require fair individual arbitration instead of class actions, culminating in the win for the business community in AT&T Mobility LLC v. Concepcion.

Evan’s award is reason enough for us to write this post.  But what the award does not capture is that, in addition to being among the very best appellate lawyers who represent businesses, he is a wonderful teacher, mentor, and friend.  Evan has guided the two of us, as well as many other Mayer Brown lawyers, as our careers have developed.  Indeed, Evan encouraged us to launch this blog.  So we have especially good reason to celebrate Evan’s recent accomplishment.

We’ll be back to our regularly scheduled programming later this week—Archis will have a blog post on the Seventh Circuit’s 2014 cases addressing class settlements.