Thomas Curry is a Director at Saxena White and manages the Firm’s Delaware office and corporate governance litigation team. He represents institutional and individual investors in asserting their rights through litigation, with a particular focus on matters before the Delaware Court of Chancery.
Mr. Curry has served as lead or co-lead investors’ counsel in several of the most significant and highest profile corporate governance and shareholder rights matters to arise in recent years, including Employees Retirement System of the City of St. Louis v. Jones, et al., where he achieved a settlement of shareholder derivative claims brought on behalf of FirstEnergy Corp. that included a landmark $180 million monetary recovery as well as the departures of six defendants from the company’s board of directors and other wide-ranging governance reforms.
In another recent shareholder derivative action, International Union of Operating Engineers and Orlando Police Pension Fund v. Ressler, et al., Mr. Curry achieved a settlement of claims brought on behalf of J2 Global, Inc. that relieved the company of obligations to pay more than $71 million in future management fees and capital contributions in connection with an allegedly-conflicted related-party investment agreement, while also instituting a new board-level related-party transactions policy.
Most recently, Mr. Curry has been at the forefront in pushing back against a trend of newly-public companies, particularly in Silicon Valley, adopting complex capital structures and voting procedures designed to entrench the voting control of their founders and other insiders. He served as co-lead counsel in In re Palantir Technologies Inc. Class F Stock Litigation, which brought a novel challenge to the validity of founder-entrenching voting provisions in Palantir’s certificate of incorporation and resulted in a settlement fundamentally reforming Palantir’s voting procedures and implementing significant new governance protections designed to prevent future controller overreach at the company. Mr. Curry is now involved in multiple similar pending cases bringing statutory challenges to insider-entrenching voting provisions at other companies.
Mr. Curry has been widely recognized for his work on behalf of investors, including by The Legal 500, which has twice named him a “Rising Star” nationally.
Before joining Saxena White, Mr. Curry worked at a nationally recognized securities litigation firm. He earned a J.D. from Cornell Law School and a B.A. from Temple University.