Thomas J. Dougherty heads the Litigation Group in the firm’s Boston office, where he has been a partner since 1984. Mr. Dougherty has been active in many of the major control contests and other court and SEC challenges to company disclosures and officer/director conduct in the past 20 years. He has been heavily involved in litigation that has fashioned the standards by which subsequent cases have been governed, including those involving The Boston Company, Citigroup, Computervision, Continental Cablevision, EMC, General Electric, Guardian, Hycor, Instron, Interco, Lotus, MacMillan, Polaroid, Prospect Street, Stratus and Unitrode.
Mr. Dougherty focuses on the representation and defense of companies, their officers, directors, underwriters and auditors. He has been involved from boardroom to courtroom in numerous significant cases before juries and judges in federal and state courts in Massachusetts, Delaware and elsewhere. His experience includes litigating in defense of corporate actions and disclosures, proxy contests, hostile takeovers, and numerous class action and derivative cases. Harvard Business School has done a case study on his defense of a high-tech defendant against securities fraud allegations. He successfully has defended companies and their management in major class action trials in Massachusetts state and federal courts against allegations that directors “froze out” and otherwise defrauded minority stockholders.
Because Mr. Dougherty represents a number of high-tech companies, he has litigated numerous expedited cases protecting (or defending against allegations of theft of) trade secrets and confidential information, enforcing or resisting enforcement of covenants not to compete, and protecting other interests such as licenses, copyrights, trademarks and corporate opportunities.
Mr. Dougherty repeatedly has been selected for inclusion in Chambers USA: America’s Leading Lawyers for Business including in 2009 where he is ranked as a “star individual” for securities litigation. He also was selected in The Best Lawyers in America 2010.
He is the author of The Directors’ Handbook.
