James Michael Evangelista

Jim Evangelista has over nineteen years of diverse, hands-on, complex financial fraud, commercial and class action litigation experience representing both plaintiffs and defendants in federal and state courts around the United States with extensive experience in electronic discovery matters.

Mr. Evangelista's broad plaintiffs' experience includes the representation of institutional pension funds, corporations and individual investors in securities fraud class action, merger and acquisition, shareholder derivative, and general business tort and commercial litigation against public companies such as AT&T, Bank of America, Beazer Homes USA Inc., BellSouth Corp., Cingular Wireless, Coca Cola Enterprises, Inc., Dell Inc., Mirant Corp., New York Community Bankcorp, Spectrum Brands Inc., Verizon, Vonage Holdings Corp., and Washington Mutual Bank. During his career Mr. Evangelista has helped investors and other clients recover over $100 million in losses from securities fraud and other wrongdoing, has fought procedurally and financially unfair acquisitions of public companies and breaches of fiduciary duty by corporate management and boards of directors, and has forced one public company's board to adopt new corporate governance measures designed to improve worker safety and management accountability.

On the defense side, and primarily during his decade tenure at Skadden Arps Slate Meagher & Flom LLP and LeBoeuf, Lamb Greene & MacRae LLP, Mr. Evangelista assisted a substantial number of Fortune 100 and other corporate clients in high profile class action matters and internal corporate investigations including the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company in the Insurance Sales Practices Litigation, Aventis CropScience/Bayer CropScience in the StarLink™ Corn Litigation, and Compaq Computer Company in the Floppy Disk Controller Litigation. Mr. Evangelista also participated in the Independent Counsel's investigation of the United States Justice Department's prosecution of Banca Nazionale del Lavoro for illegal loans to the Government of Iraq (the “Iraqgate Scandal"), the Independent Administrator's court appointed oversight of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, and in the internal investigations regarding illegal political campaign contributions by a large public utility and improper player and team owner conduct within a major national sports association.

Mr. Evangelista is admitted to the United States Court of Appeals for the First, Second, Eighth, Ninth and Eleventh Circuits; the United States District Courts for the Northern District of Georgia, Southern and Eastern Districts of New York, the District of New Jersey; and the State Bars of Georgia, New York, New Jersey, Colorado and the District of Columbia.

Mr. Evangelista attended Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey, and graduated in 1988 with a dual degree in Economics and Political Science. In 1991 Mr. Evangelista earned his J.D. from Rutgers University School of Law, in Camden, New Jersey, where he was Articles Editor of the school's Law Review and a recipient of its International Law Honors Program Award.