In the world of shareholder battles—where fortunes rise, reputations wobble, and boardrooms sweat—an unexpected caravan has peeled away from one of the country’s biggest plaintiff firms.
Twelve lawyers, once part of the engine room at Bernstein Litowitz Berger & Grossmann, have packed up their briefs and marched out to form a brand-new investor-rights outfit. Leading the charge is Jeroen van Kwawegen, the architect of the case that toppled Elon Musk’s $56 billion Tesla pay packet—a sum a Delaware court memorably dismissed as “unfathomable.”
Van Kwawegen says the new venture, JVK Law, switched on its lights on Wednesday. Offices are already staked out in Los Angeles, New York, and Wilmington—three cities accustomed to financial friction and corporate drama. According to him, most of the corporate governance unit from his former firm has crossed over with him, and the door is open for more.
But the split is anything but tidy.
Bernstein Litowitz, responding hours later, claimed van Kwawegen had actually been fired in mid-November for conduct it described as harmful to the firm’s interests. No details, just the assertion. Van Kwawegen fired back just as quickly, calling the allegation “pretextual” and expressing pride that so many colleagues were choosing to join him in the new venture.
Behind the rupture lies a larger concern, van Kwawegen argues: powerful institutional investors—pension giants, hedge funds, asset managers—needing sturdier private-sector shields now that the country’s financial watchdogs appear to be in retreat.
At Bernstein Litowitz, van Kwawegen’s track record was formidable. Among his victories: a billion-dollar settlement extracted from Wells Fargo after accusations that the bank had misled shareholders about its efforts to clean up customer-abuse scandals.
And then there’s the Tesla saga. A Delaware judge shredded Musk’s astronomical package last year, calling it an unfair burden on shareholders. Musk has taken the fight to appeal, but shareholders recently approved a jaw-dropping $1 trillion compensation plan—an even more staggering milestone in the long-running battle over corporate pay.
As for the departing dozen, they now begin their own odyssey in a landscape where shareholder litigation can tilt entire industries. Bernstein Litowitz remains one of the nation’s titans. But on a fresh set of letterheads in three American cities, a new contender is betting that the future of investor protection belongs to them.
