Richard Shore has more than 35 years of experience helping clients overcome bet-the-company problems and other major challenges. A warrior for his clients, Richard has been described as “relentless”.

Throughout his career, he has been at the forefront of innovations in insurance recovery, groundbreaking bankruptcy and other mechanisms to manage and resolve tort liabilities, and new approaches to alternative dispute resolution. He has helped clients recover billions of dollars in complex, multi-party business disputes and legal claims on behalf of a wide array of clients, including Fortune 500 companies, small businesses, bankruptcy committees and trustees, professional services firms, and individuals.

Richard has represented clients on virtually every type of liability or loss under a broad array of insurance policy forms and types of coverage issued by domestic, London, and other foreign insurers. He never represents insurers. Only clients seeking insurance proceeds, often in the hundreds of millions or billions of dollars.

He has advised clients facing significant liabilities on global strategies for dealing with these problems, including creative uses of insurance programs.

Richard has successfully led large litigation and transactional teams, including coordinating among multiple law and consulting firms with varying expertise on large and complex matters.

His work involves strategic advice, counseling, alternative dispute resolution, complex multi-party settlement negotiations, strategic litigation management, and appellate matters.

Richard began his career at Covington & Burling, first as an associate, and then as a partner and deputy co-chair of the insurance practice group. He then joined Dickstein Shapiro as a partner. With his mentor and friend Scott Gilbert, he was a founding partner of Gilbert LLP in 2001.

LEADERSHIP:

Richard is a member of the firm’s Executive and Evaluation Committees.

He revamped Gilbert’s evaluation and promotion system to reflect client value rather than seniority.

He dramatically increased the firm’s minority recruitment and retention through a partnership he developed with Legal Innovators, a path-breaking talent management solutions firm.

He views the mentoring of young attorneys as one of his primary professional obligations.

Reflecting his focus on settlement negotiation, Richard has developed a dispute settlement seminar that draws on Hollywood films, popular music, and New Yorker cartoons, of all things, to teach successful negotiating techniques. He offers the seminar free of charge to interested groups.

• Led claimants’ efforts to evaluate and pursue insurance coverage for harms caused by the national opioid crisis.
• Developed a successful strategy to pierce the shield that usually protects reinsurers from direct actions by an insured.
• Enabled an investment fund’s acquisition of a target company by creating a captive insurer and drafting an ultimate net loss policy to step in and pay whenever other insurers failed to do so for any reason.
• Drafted and negotiated state-of-the-art insurance-related plan language in major mass-tort bankruptcy cases.
• Secured numerous pro-insured rulings on key coverage issues, including rulings:
  • requiring insurers whose policies predated the client’s acquisition of an environmental site to cover the client’s liabilities there,
  • requiring an insurance company liquidator to estimate and pay future claims, overturning the liquidator’s multi-billion-dollar insolvency plan in favor of a more equitable approach for all creditors,
  • recognizing for the first time in Illinois that a “continuous trigger” applies to asbestos bodily injury claims,
  • recognizing that  “all sums” policy language imposes joint-and-several liability, rejecting an alleged trend in Pennsylvania in favor of insurer-friendly “pro rata” allocation.
• Retained as settlement counsel by a Fortune 500 electric power company to resolve insurance claims for multi-billion-dollar coal-ash environmental liabilities.
• Brought litigation on behalf of a client whose claims had been overlooked by another law firm, securing settlements totaling approximately $50 million.
• Helped a client recover two towers of insurance coverage totaling in the nine figures, without litigation, for a single-incident foodborne-illness outbreak.
• Negotiated the largest settlement against a state insurance guaranty fund in its history.
• Prevailed in serial appeals of federal district court rulings in a legal fee dispute.

PRO BONO PRACTICE:

Richard has an active pro bono practice. Some examples:

• Helped secure legislation in Maryland and DC that protects owners of heirs property, often from minority and economically disadvantaged backgrounds, from being victimized by real-estate speculators.
• Has advised individuals taken hostage, harmed, or threatened by foreign governments or other hostile actors, and their families, in efforts to secure their release, protect them, or obtain compensation.
• Represents individuals with limited resources whose rights have been violated by powerful institutions, including
  • a university student wrongfully accused of serious misconduct that threatened her academic career; and
  • a recovering substance abuser who was left penniless because his hospital outpatient treatment program failed to properly supervise an unscrupulous social worker.

• 1987–1988 — Keio University, Tokyo, Japan
  • Monbusho Fellow
• 1987 — J.D., Columbia University Law School
  • Harlan Fiske Stone Scholar
• 1984 — B.A. (economics), University of Maryland
  • Phi Beta Kappa (scholastic)
  • Omicron Delta Kappa (leadership)

• District of Columbia
• New York
• Cherokee Nation
• U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second, Fourth and Ninth Circuits
• U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia
• U.S. District Court for the Eastern and Southern Districts of New York

• Harvard Law School Leadership in Law Firms Program, September 2022
• Best Lawyers in America
• Guide to the World’s Leading Insurance and Reinsurance Lawyers, Legal Media Group/EuroMoney
• Washington, DC Super Lawyer
• Capital Pro Bono Honor Roll, High Honors (DC Courts; DC Bar; DC Access to Justice Commission)
• Recognized by two bankruptcy judges for exceptional service in mass-tort chapter 11 reorganization cases.
• Appointed by Washington, DC Mayor Muriel Bowser to ReOpen DC Advisory Group following coronavirus pandemic.
• Former Board Member, American Friends of Hebrew University, Mid-Atlantic Region
• Former Director, Reneo Consulting LLC (strategic consulting firm)
• Former Board Member, The China Fund, Inc.