CHICAGO — The National Law Journal has named DiCello Levitt co-founding partners Mark DiCello and Adam Levitt among its 2020 Crisis Leadership Trailblazers. Honorees are attorneys who have launched new initiatives to help their clients and industries through times of crisis.
Mark DiCello and Adam Levitt rallied their team of employees to work to hold insurance companies accountable for COVID-19-related misconduct—a natural outgrowth of DiCello Levitt’s ongoing effort to protect their clients, in the United States and around the world, through the firm’s litigation approach. The approach focuses on early and aggressive claim identification and analysis, coupled with the firm’s “trial first” framing, which has been shown, to regularly result in best-in-class results for their clients.
For DiCello Levitt, in the COVID-19 crisis, this approach has taken two forms.
In the weeks following the COVID-19 outbreak, realizing the potentially crushing financial consequences that this pandemic could have on American businesses, DiCello Levitt, forming a small coalition of other law firms, set out to protect those by filing business interruption suits across the United States, demanding that insurance companies honor their contractual obligations to their policyholders and pay out on valid business interruption insurance claims.
“We further channeled our firm’s social responsibility credo by focusing our energies on representing thousands of business owners—from neighborhood restaurants, to national chain stores, to professional sports teams—in their fight to survive and recover from the COVID-19 pandemic,” stated Mark DiCello. As Levitt added, “it is a testament to the recognized quality of our firm’s legal and crisis-related offerings, coupled with our co-counsel’s similar qualities, that have enabled important American businesses to put their faith and their futures in our hands and have charged us with the responsibility of protecting their companies and fighting for their right to get the coverage that they paid for and to which they are entitled. The fact is that if a business has its future on the line, and needs to protect that future through litigation, DiCello Levitt is the law firm that they should be calling.”
Additionally, the firm’s lawyers and staff listened to the real financial concerns of student and families, and, after listening, filed the first national litigation to recoup student fees from colleges and universities. According to Adam Levitt, this decisive action is at the heart of our firm culture, “[s]aying that you want to do the right thing and actually doing the right thing, are two completely different things. Say whatever you want, but it’s what you actually do, from the results you achieve and the path that you take to get there, that’s really important.”
For the full supplement, read here.