With offices in New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Washington, DC, and Florida, Gibbons has been recognized nationally for its work, as well as regionally. The New Jersey Law Journal has included Gibbons in the “Litigation Practice of the Year” program five times in recent years, in the labor and employment, class action, products liability, and commercial litigation categories and with the overall “General Litigation Practice of the Year” designation. The firm has been certified as a great workplace by the independent analysts at the Great Place to Work® organization.
Our business model is focused on offering high quality, cost-effective legal services, handling major matters for mid-market companies (with annual revenues of $100 million to $2.5 billion) and mid-market matters for Fortune 500 companies, notably in the Mid-Atlantic region and expanding down the East Coast.
With headquarters in Newark, New Jersey and seven other thriving offices, Gibbons has a presence that lends itself to exceptional regional coverage. With cutting-edge video, audio, and network technology linking all of our offices, we are able to close major deals and devise litigation strategies for matters that involve Gibbons attorneys across several firm locations and client representatives throughout a number of their own sites – as if we were all in the same room.
Legal Services
Gibbons has been recognized regionally and nationally for its multidisciplinary strengths.
Business & Commercial Litigation: Handling sophisticated and complex commercial litigation, including securities class actions, antitrust, RICO actions, shareholder and partnership disputes, contract disputes, Consumer Fraud Act claims, Lanham Act, restrictive covenants, business torts (including fraud and misrepresentation, intentional interference, unfair competition, trade libel, trade secret theft), bankruptcy litigation, class action defense, construction litigation, and insurance and reinsurance. Active E-Discovery Task Force helping companies to prevent document retention and electronic discovery problems and to solve such problems that do arise.
Corporate: Advising leading area and global corporations and other businesses and financial institutions on the full range of corporate law matters, including mergers, acquisitions, divestitures, restructurings, joint ventures, licensing, corporate finance, commercial lending, capital raising, regulatory compliance, corporate governance, tax, and complex business transactions requiring novel solutions, as well as serving as outside general counsel.
Employment & Labor Law: Representing employers in federal and state courts, in litigation involving discrimination, harassment, retaliation, wage and hour, employment contract, restrictive covenant, wrongful discharge, employee benefits, and ERISA claims. Providing preventive and compliance counseling and training with an emphasis on discipline and discharge, harassment, disability-related leaves and accommodations, workforce restructurings, restrictive covenants, and executive compensation. Conducting workplace investigations and audits of employment practices. Addressing the full range of traditional labor issues.
Environmental: Handling all areas of environmental law, including providing assistance with a variety of clients’ litigation, regulatory, permitting, redevelopment, and transactional needs.
Financial Restructuring & Creditors’ Rights: Representing creditors, debtors, and various fiduciaries in all aspects of complex business insolvency issues and proceedings, including federal bankruptcy proceedings; state court litigation involving receiverships, attachments, replevins, and foreclosures; out-of-court workouts and related debtor and creditor relations counseling to resolve insolvency issues; and disputes outside of formal proceedings.
Government & Regulatory Affairs: Counseling entities in the public, private, and nonprofit sectors on state and federal government relations issues, including legislative lobbying, regulatory counseling, and interaction with state agencies.
Intellectual Property: Providing a full range of patent, trademark, copyright, unfair competition, e-commerce, trade secret, and computer and internet law experience in the areas of litigation, strategic licensing and transactional work, patent prosecution, trademark and copyright registrations, corporate due diligence, intellectual property audits, and general intellectual property counseling.
Products Liability: Representing product manufacturers in a variety of industries. Defending pharmaceutical and medical/surgical device manufacturers, as well as diagnostic laboratories, in complex matters involving issues such as purported adverse effects; design, warnings, and/or manufacturing defects; and results of laboratory analyses. Defending industrial equipment, automotive, and consumer product manufacturers in a wide variety of claims relating to products liability issues.
Real Property: Providing real estate counseling and litigation services for all types of properties. Extensive real property practice handling sales, purchases, and development of properties, including office buildings, industrial and flex buildings, retail centers, apartment buildings, and hotels.
White Collar & Investigations: Investigating and defending against allegations of business, accounting, securities, bank, insurance, tax, healthcare, and government contract fraud. Defending clients in many high-profile investigations and prosecutions of alleged political corruption and business crime, particularly in the pharmaceutical and communications industries.
International Work: Providing full services to international clients doing business in the U.S., as well as to U.S. clients operating in international markets. Gibbons is also a member of the Geneva Group International, a network of independent professional service firms offering a full range of legal, accounting, and other services worldwide.
Recent Awards & Recognition
Numerous organizations and publications have recently honored the firm for its work.
Chambers USA Guide to America’s Leading Lawyers for Business: The 2023 edition of the Chambers USA Guide features 14 Gibbons practice areas and 27 individual Gibbons attorneys. The firm has appeared in the New Jersey section of the Chambers guide since its inception and has broken into the New York rankings as well. Chambers annually rates the nation’s leading business lawyers and law firms through comprehensive interviews with top companies, attorneys, and business executives, plus extensive supplementary research.
Woodward/White Best Lawyers® and U.S. News Best Lawyers® – Best Law Firms: In the most recent edition of the oldest, most respected peer-review publication in the legal profession, 35 of the firm’s specialty areas achieved national and metropolitan rankings, and 61 of the firm’s attorneys were individually selected for inclusion, representing all of the firm’s practice areas. The firm also earned eight national rankings this year, in the categories of Construction Law; Employment Law – Management; Land Use & Zoning Law; Litigation – First Amendment; Real Estate Law; and, in the National Tier 1, Environmental Law; Litigation – Construction; and Mass Tort Litigation/Class Actions – Defendants. In addition to these rankings, two Gibbons Directors are featured as 2024 “Lawyers of the Year” in their respective legal markets. The lawyers, their areas of practice, and markets are John D. Draikiwicz: Public Finance Law (Newark) and David J. Pascrell: Government Relations Practice (Princeton).
Thomson Reuters Super Lawyers and Rising Stars: Appearing on the most recent lists, by state, were: 49 Gibbons attorneys in New Jersey and 12 in New York. The Super Lawyers selection process comprises annual statewide or regional surveys, with more than 800,000 lawyers asked to nominate the best attorneys they have personally seen in practice.
New Jersey Law Journal “Litigation Departments of the Year” Awards, 2013-2023: The New Jersey Law Journal has rewarded the firm’s multidisciplinary litigation strength five times in recent years, with top overall honors in its 2014 statewide litigation awards program and individual recognition for the firm’s labor and employment (2023), class action (2017), products liability (2016), and commercial litigation (2013) practices.
Intellectual Asset Management “Patent 1000 – The World’s Leading Patent Litigators”: Intellectual Asset Management (IAM) has named Gibbons among the top intellectual property law firms in New Jersey in the current edition of IAM Patent Litigation 1000 – The World’s Leading Patent Litigators.
Top Lawyer-Lobbying Firm by Revenue in New Jersey: The New Jersey Election Law Enforcement Commission recently ranked Gibbons as the state’s #1 lawyer-lobbying firm by revenue for the fifteenth year in a row. Gibbons has also ranked sixth in the state among all lobbying firms.
DOW JONES Private Equity Analyst “Most Active Law Firms”: For six consecutive years, Private Equity Analyst, a DOW JONES publication providing premier coverage of the industry, ranked Gibbons among the country’s most active law firms in the private equity arena, both in number of deals and number of funds, areas handled by our firm’s Corporate Department. Gibbons was the only New Jersey headquartered firm to be ranked in both categories for each of the six years.
Client Service
Every matter is an opportunity for partnership between Gibbons and our clients. We have established a number of firm-wide client service standards and platforms to reinforce our commitment to these client relationships.
Accessibility Standards
Gibbons has implemented numerous policies related to attorney responsiveness and accessibility to clients. All attorneys and professional staff are supplied with smartphones to enable instant and continuous client communications. We have email and return call policies that require our attorneys to respond to any client outreach within two hours, with both of these policies monitored through client feedback. The firm’s client extranet, described below, adds another level of efficiency and allows a more robust exchange of information to electronic collaboration. With regard to attorney work product, our standard is to give 48-hour lead time on drafts.
Knowledge Management
The Gibbons Knowledge Management team uses a combination of external resources and proprietary technologies for “just in time” delivery of crucial information to our attorneys and clients. For example, we use our Gibbons kmAlerts System and other resources to actively monitor news, case law, business and legal issues, industries, and docket events, which allows our attorneys to proactively inform clients of important developments that impact their businesses. The kmAlerts System is automated and incurs no cost to clients; it is designed to capitalize on efficiency while providing our attorneys comprehensive, current pictures of our clients’ business situations. Gibbons also gives our attorneys weekly access to LexisNexis and Westlaw training sessions that help them stay abreast of the most up-to-date legal research tools and new product features, enhancing the legal research process and enabling us to communicate the research results more comprehensively, clearly, and cost-effectively.
Over the years, our attorneys have developed inventories of legal research, briefs, and work product on virtually every legal issue related to their fields. These research banks are continually updated, expanded, and digitized. More formally, our firm has made a substantial investment and deployed a proprietary knowledge management tool that allows us to significantly reduce the learning curve for attorney teams and increase efficiency by streamlining workflow and offering our attorneys easy access to relevant subject specific work product. This tool provides the firm with a sustainable competitive advantage by allowing us to leverage a comprehensive knowledge base of all firm work product.
Gibbons Academy
Gibbons can provide complimentary, on-site CLE training sessions to the in-house counsel at your company, which, in addition to saving you professional development costs, result in greater productivity by maximizing in-house knowledge of emerging laws. Other custom programs can address non-attorney professional, supervisory, and general staff. In addition, the firm invites clients, at no cost, to numerous seminars and programs on a variety of legal topics at several Gibbons locations throughout the year; these programs are also eligible for CLE credits.
Blogs, Newsletters, and Other Resources
Gibbons publishes numerous practice-specific client newsletters, ranging from immediate-turnaround updates alerting clients to legislative, judicial, or marketplace developments that impact their businesses, to more comprehensive legal analyses of critical issues and legal decisions. Our attorneys also write articles and provide commentary for a wide array of the local and national legal, business, industry, and general news publications that our clients read. When applicable, we post reprints of or links to these articles on our website for our clients’ reference.
Our blogs and newsletters are online resources designed to provide practical perspectives on developing legal and business news, analysis, and discussion to in-house lawyers and business professionals. Their content focuses on the most critical legal issues impacting business today, distilling an extraordinary amount of available information to introduce the news and topics most useful to the audience; providing links to key external resources; adding Gibbons attorneys’ unique perspectives and seasoned insight, based on legal and business experience; and initiating in-depth discussions among readers. To read or subscribe to the Gibbons Law Alert blog, visit www.gibbonslawalert.com.
Client Extranet
To ensure responsive communication and enable collaboration, Gibbons can offer interested clients access to custom client extranets that provide secure, web-based access to pleadings, briefs and other documents, threaded discussions, critical deadlines, and additional materials, as well as our litigation support tools, from anywhere in the world. As they do for key clients of the firm, our Information Technology, Litigation Support, and Knowledge Management teams are prepared to instruct clients on extranet use, at no cost to the clients. The firm has created a detailed online survey for use after matters that ties into the technology and sharing capabilities of our extranet system. In addition to serving as an important collaboration tool, the extranet is a means to follow up after a matter’s completion and formally capture feedback from the matter that can be applied to future projects. The after-matter review also provides the opportunity to exchange with the client insight on best practices we have learned in the course of matter. All after-matter reviews are analyzed among corresponding client service teams.
Alternative Fee Arrangements
Gibbons engages in various alternative fee arrangements to provide cost-saving benefits to clients. These include: discounted hourly rates; volume discounts; blended rates; task-based billing; fixed fees; monthly retainers; cost plus contingency; and result-oriented billing.