About the Authors

• Author: Michael H. Barr/Burton N. Lipshie/Sharon Stern Gerstman
• Pages: 7-8

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About the Authors

Michael H. Barr is a partner with Dentons US LLP in New York City. His prac-

tice concentrates on complex commercial, class action, insurance coverage, and securi-

ties litigation across a broad spectrum of substantive areas, including consumer fraud,

environmental, insurance, trade regulation, real estate, professional liability, and contrac-

tual disputes.

Mr. Barr is presently serving as national coordinating counsel for an international insurer

in defending a series of class actions involving retrospective premium workers’ compensation

issues. Over the past five years, he has defended another major insurer against allegations

of improper life insurance sales practices in a consolidated multi-district litigation in federal

court and before a multi-state task force of state insurance departments.

He has successfully defended a broad array of other companies in bad faith and other

insurance coverage actions, including numerous appeals. He has lectured and written on a

variety of insurance coverage issues, and has delivered papers at seminars on advertising injury, securities coverage, and

bad faith issues. He has also successfully represented investor groups, bank directors and public companies in contested

securities and mergers and acquisition cases.

Mr. Barr is a cum laude graduate of Harvard Law School.

Burton N. Lipshie has since 1977 been the Managing Attorney of the 60-lawyer

Litigation Department of Stroock & Stroock & Lavan in New York City, and the firm’s

national litigation coordinator.

He is responsible for providing procedural expertise in all litigation matters handled

by the New York City office, and for creating and running programs on litigation skills and

advanced legal writing. He has a general litigation practice, with an emphasis on motions

and appellate work.

Before joining Stroock, Mr. Lipshie was an Assistant District Attorney in New York

County from 1967 to 1971, and Law Secretary to Justice Abraham Gellinoff, Supreme

Court, New York County and Appellate Term, First Department from 1971 to 1977.

Since 1985, Mr. Lipshie has been an adjunct professor at Cardozo School of Law

where he teaches New York Practice, Legal Writing, and Moot Court. For nine years in a

row he was named “Outstanding Adjunct Professor” and now the award is named after him.

He serves on the Advisory Committee on Civil Practice to the Chief Administrative Judge, the CPLR Committee of

the State Bar Association, and the Departmental Disciplinary Committee of the Appellate Division, First Department.

He has provided the annual CPLR update at the Unified Court System annual judicial seminars since 1993, as well

as the annual seminar for Law Clerks and Court Attorneys, and has delivered the annual Civil Law Update at the Bar

Association of the City of New York.

Sharon Stern Gerstman is of counsel to Magavern Magavern Grimm LLP in Buffalo,

New York, after spending 29 years working for New York Supreme Court as the Principal

Law Clerk for Hon. Joseph D. Mintz of the Eight Judicial District (Buffalo) of the New York

Supreme Court (1981-2009), and as a Court Attorney/Referee in charge of ADR for the Niagara

County Supreme Court (2010). She is also an adjunct professor at the University of Buffalo Law

School, where she has taught New York Civil Practice since 1987.

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