Complex litigation are cases far from straightforward requiring more intensive and dedicated legal organization. Complexity may be determined by multiple parties and their attorneys, numerous expert witnesses, thorny subjects, complicated causation, hotly contested liability, procedural complexity, multifaceted substantive laws, extensive discovery, choice of laws, complex damage determinations, or requisites of obtaining class-certification.
These complex cases require exceptional litigation management to navigate numerous pretrial motions raising difficult or novel legal issues; manage the parties, witnesses, or copious amounts of evidence; and coordinate with related actions pending in other courts or states.
Mr. Cowan has successfully navigated individual, class, and mass action clients through complex legal proceedings:
- Mr. Cowan represented an entire neighborhood in environmental contamination actions through State, Federal and Bankruptcy Courts, wherein five significant opinions were published.
- Mr. Cowan was part of a team of trial lawyers who took to verdict claims of neighbors bordering an extensive construction project that destroyed their homes’ subsurface lateral support.
- Mr. Cowan filed actions for three states and was appointed to the Damages Committee in a class action antitrust lawsuit, In re: Blue Cross Blue Shield Antitrust Litigation MDL 2406, N.D. Ala. Master File No. 2:13-cv-20000-RDP, resulting in a $2.67 billion settlement fund, and business model changes to increase competition in the health insurance market.
- Mr. Cowan has handled unique one-off complex defamation claims, multi-party airplane crashes, fatal unsafe gun storage actions, and felonious killing cases.
- Mr. Cowan has litigated complicated crashworthiness and design defect cases. He has engaged automotive design experts to re-engineer automobiles and then fully crash test the safer designs to prove that better designs exist for occupants to survive crashes and rollovers. He has proven that tire blowouts or de-treads are preventable and loss-of-control unnecessary.
- Mr. Cowan represented a deserving US military service member claiming design defects of a diversionary hand grenade subject to the government contractor defense.
- Mr. Cowan was endorsed as an expert in a Toronto, Ontario, Canadian Court.
- Mr. Cowan has obtained Court Orders against his opposition preventing unqualified so-called experts in various states and federal courts from testifying. Yet at the same time, Court Orders upholding the admissibility of his expert witnesses’ testimony retained for his clients’ causes.
- Mr. Cowan, on occasion, will defend litigants in unmeritorious litigation. Defending a real estate trust in bogus breach of contract claims not only resulted in a complete vindication for his client at trial, but also a judgment for the collection of attorneys’ fees and costs exceeding the amount wrongly sought by his opposition.