In her 35 years of trial practice, Kathy’s cases have run the gamut of high profile, high dollar, and high risk cases. She has represented clients pursuing recoveries for securities frauds in Brazil, Thailand, and Indonesia, the private prison industry, the waste disposal industry, and in mortgage-backed securities. She has also pursued commercial cases for clients seeking to enforce leveraged buyout agreements, construction contracts, and corporate indemnities. On the defense side, she successfully defended a client accused of a market allocation conspiracy in the North Sea, defended the outside directors of Enron and Westar in regulatory investigations and securities litigation, and is leading the defense of a large energy company in environmental and energy litigation. Kathy’s representative clients include: Occidental Petroleum Corporation, ExxonMobil, PIMCO, BlackRock, Trust Company of the West, Invesco, Western Asset Management, the former outside directors of Enron Corporation and the State of Arizona.
In the wake of the financial crisis, Kathy led a team that pursued recoveries for a group of 14 large institutional investors who purchased securitized mortgages that contained fraudulent or ineligible loans. Over a period of five years, Kathy and her team recovered more than $20 billion in cash and additional billions of dollars in mortgage servicing reforms from major financial institutions including Bank of America, JPMorgan, Citigroup, Residential Capital, and Lehman Brothers. Forbes magazine profiled Kathy’s RMBS efforts and called her the woman Wall Street fears most and the Wall Street Journal called her the secret weapon for big bond investors seeking to recover billions of dollars on faulty mortgage-backed securities.
After graduating from Harvard Law School, Kathy was a law clerk to Judge John R. Brown, United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, from 1985 to 1986.
