Our Attorneys

efore graduating from law school, Mr. Coffey was a Commissioned Officer in the United States Navy, where he served as a P-3C Orion patrol plane mission commander, an Intern in the Organization for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the personal military aide to Vice President George H.W. Bush.  After leaving active duty to pursue his legal career, Mr. Coffey continued to serve in the Navy Reserve, where he commanded a P-3C squadron and the Reserve component of the Enterprise carrier battle group staff, and served for four years as a Captain in the Office of the Secretary of Defense at the Pentagon.  In August 2004, he retired from the Navy after thirty years of uniformed service.

Mr. Coffey served as an Assistant United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York from 1991 to 1995, where he conducted numerous complex fraud investigations and tried many cases to verdict.

Since joining BLB&G in 1998, Mr. Coffey has served as the lead trial attorney in two of the most notable fraud cases ever to go to trial.  In April 2005, Mr. Coffey and his BLB&G team completed their prosecution of the WorldCom securities class action -- a prosecution that yielded a record-breaking recovery for defrauded investors of over $6.15 billion -- by taking the lone non-settling defendant, WorldCom's former auditor Arthur Andersen LLP, to trial.  Mr. Coffey's role in the WorldCom prosecution was featured in a December 2004 article in The American Lawyer entitled "Taking Citi To School" and a November 2005 article in The American Lawyer entitled "Breaking The Banks."

In 2002, in another trial against Andersen, this time arising out of the collapse of the Baptist Foundation of Arizona, BFA Liquidation Trust v. Arthur Andersen LLP, the largest non-profit bankruptcy in U.S. history, Mr. Coffey obtained a $217 million settlement, one of the largest amounts ever paid by an accounting firm.

Mr. Coffey currently serves as court-appointed Lead Counsel representing investors in the Schering-Plough, HealthSouth, Merck, Refco and Delphi litigations, and copyright holders in the Premier League v. YouTube class action.

Mr. Coffey has been profiled in The Wall Street Journal, The American Lawyer, and BusinessWeek, and was featured on "The Wall Street Fix" on PBS' Frontline.  Mr. Coffey and senior BLB&G partner Max Berger were named two of the 2005 "Winning Attorneys of the Year" by the National Law Journal, and the September 2005 issue of Bloomberg Markets profiled Mr. Coffey as "Wall Street's New Nemesis."

Prior to joining BLB&G, Mr. Coffey was a litigation partner with Latham & Watkins and an Adjunct Professor of Law at Fordham University.  He is actively involved with his alma maters, serving as Vice President of the United States Naval Academy Class of 1978 and a member of the Board of Visitors of the Georgetown University Law Center.  He is also a member of the Federal Bar Council (where he is a trustee of the Federal Bar Foundation), the American Bar Association, the Association of the Bar of the City of New York (where he is a member of its Securities Litigation Committee), the American Association for Justice, and the Public Justice Foundation.  Mr. Coffey is also a member of the Board of Directors of The Community Fund of Bronxville, Eastchester, Tuckahoe, Inc., in Westchester County, N.Y.