Professional Profile
For some 30 years, Ken has devoted himself to helping those whose rights have been denied, or who have been victims of the unscrupulous or fraudulent actions of others — usually by more powerful people and organizations. Founder of Wexler Wallace, Ken was also a founding partner of the firm formerly known as Miller Faucher Cafferty and Wexler LLP. Before then, he was a partner in the Chicago law firm then known as Much Shelist Freed Dennenberg Ament & Eiger, PC.

Ken has been in leadership positions in cases with far-ranging subject matters, including brand name manufacturer suppression of competition from generic drugs, fraudulent and deceptive product overcharges, discrimination and harassment, corporate waste and mismanagement, cost recovery for defective medical devices, false advertising, and government fraud. Ken’s practice is devoted to complex class action and commercial litigation, which includes claims brought under federal and various state false claims statutes, and the securities and antitrust laws. At present, Ken is focused on protecting issuers of municipal bonds, recovering losses for pension funds and other investors that were victimized by unlawful and improvident securities lending practices, and cost-recovery for victims of healthcare fraud, including Taft-Hartley Funds, self-insured employers, and governments, and recapturing benefits stripped from investors by high-profile participants in a public merger.

Read Ken Wexler’s White Paper on the problems faced by pension plans and governments engaged in securities lending programs.

Appointed & Representative Positions
Ken Wexler has served as lead counsel in numerous high profile cases, including the following:

New England Carpenters Health Benefits Fund v. First Databank, et al., Case No. 1:05-CV-11148 (D. Mass.).
Ken was Co-Lead Counsel on this matter alleging a RICO conspiracy to abruptly increase the published spread between average wholesale prices and wholesale acquisition costs for pharmaceuticals in the 2001-2002 time frame, causing purchasers to pay billions of dollars extra for needed drugs. Two of the Defendants, First Databank and Medispan, settled by agreeing to roll back the average wholesale prices of affected drugs. Estimates pinned the savings to consumers and third-party payers from this rollback at hundreds of millions of dollars. The remaining defendant, McKesson Corp., settled on a class wide basis for $350 million.  Read more.

Archstone Litigation — Stender v. Cardwell, Tishman Speyer Development Corp., et al., Case No. 1:07-CV-02503-REB-MJW (D. Colo.).
On November 30, 2007, Wexler Wallace instituted litigation on behalf of a class of investors who had negotiated for securities with certain essential characteristics, only to see those characteristics stripped away through a merger transaction in which the investors had no say. The complaint alleges, among other things, breaches of fiduciary duty, breach of contract and civil conspiracy. Read more.

In re Pharmaceutical Industry Average Wholesale Price Litigation, MDL No. 1456 (D. Mass.).
Wexler Wallace initiated a wave of class actions nationwide against the dominant pharmaceutical manufacturers to stop the fraudulent publication of a fictitious price called Average Wholesale Price, or AWP. Manipulation of AWP by Defendants caused federal and state governments, third party payors (“TPPs”), and consumers to vastly overpay for prescription drugs. Ken was appointed Co-Lead Counsel and has been actively involved in all aspects of this monumental case, which has resulted in a trial verdict for the Plaintiffs and hundreds of millions of dollars in settlements.  Read more.

RBC Litigation — In re Balanced Return Fund Limited, et al., v. Royal Bank of Canada, Case No. 09-600949 (N.Y. Sup. Ct.).
This breach of fiduciary case against the Royal Bank of Canada (“RBC”) and related Defendants (with RBC, the “RBC Defendants”) seeks to recover investments in Olympus United Funds (the “Fund”) lost during the period from 2000-mid-2005 as a result of conduct by the RBC Defendants that caused the collapse of the Fund.  Specifically, the RBC Defendants disregarded the interests of the Plaintiffs and other investors in favor of their own interests by approving a transaction which depleted the Fund of assets while appropriating the benefits of those assets for themselves.  Read more.

Paxil Litigation – Nichols v. SmithKline Beecham Corp., Case No. 2:00-CV-06222-JP (E.D. Pa.).
An antitrust case in which Plaintiffs alleged that several of Defendants’ patents for paroxetine hydrochloride were improperly listed in the FDA Orange Book and that Defendants’ patent infringement litigation against various generic drug manufacturers was “sham” litigation designed to keep generic versions of Paxil® off the market. Ken, as one of three Co-Lead Counsel, had to build the Paxil case from the ground up. The Paxil litigation is believed to be one of the first, if not the first, to allege misuse of patents to delay generic competition in a pharmaceutical market brought under Section 2 of the Sherman Act rather than Section 1. Despite these hurdles, and after extensive discovery and investigation, the case settled for $65 million in cash. The favorable response to this hard-fought settlement was overwhelming – over 60,000 consumers filed claims.  Read more.

The Village of Maywood, Illinois v. Unison-Maximus, Inc., Hill Taylor & Company, LLC, et al. Case No. 00 L 014029  (Ill. Cir. Ct. Cook County).
Wexler Wallace pursued this action on behalf of a municipality against its management consulting and accounting firm as well as its auditors.  The municipality asserted that the management consulting and accounting firm, which had been hired to run the Village’s Finance Department, failed to fulfill its duties, by, among other things, failing to keep a detailed general ledger of the Village’s finances over a multi-year period. The Village alleged that its auditor wrongfully failed to notify the Village that the financial statements prepared by the management consulting and accounting firm were unreliable, leading to decisions affecting the economic viability of the Village. The parties ultimately entered into a confidential settlement that completely resolved the litigation. Read more.

In re Wellbutrin XL Indirect Purchaser Antitrust Litigation, Case No. 2:08-CV-02433-MAM (E.D. Pa.):
On August 15, 2011, Ken was appointed co-lead counsel of the indirect purchaser class, which consists of third party payors and certain consumers which purchased Wellbutrin XL and its generic (once available) from November 14, 2005 to April 29, 2011 in six states: California, Florida, Nevada, New York, Tennessee, and Wisconsin.  Ken was appointed as co-lead counsel, along with Richard Cohen and Peter St. Philip of Lowey Dannenberg Cohen & Hart, as well as Jim G. Stranch and Joe P. Leniski , Jr.  of Branstetter, Stranch, & Jennings.

Memberships

• American Bar Association
• Illinois State Bar Association
• Chicago Bar Association
• Federal Bar Association
• Illinois Trial Lawyers Association
• Chicago Council of Lawyers
• American Association for Justice
• Fellow of the Roscoe Pound Institute
• American Constitution Society for Law and Policy
• Public Justice, Class Action Preservation Project
• National Association of State Treasurers

Charitable & Community Contributions

• Chicago Coalition for the Homeless
• Lifetime Member of the 100 Club of Chicago
• Delegate to People to People International
• Board Member, Vice President and Treasurer of OCD Chicago
• Board Member, Anti-Defamation League;  Executive Committee Member, Civil Rights Committee

Publications, Presentations & Teaching

• Ken’s expertise has been sought by local, national and international media, including interviews by the London Economist, Property Week, Chinese television and syndicated programs, on both national radio and TV, including The Law Business Insider.
• Ken was profiled in Fortune Magazine as one of America’s premier lawyers, has written on class action issues for the American Association for Justice, actively lectures on consumer fraud, and has been a panelist at national legal seminars.
• Ken is an adjunct professor at the Loyola University Chicago School of Law, teaching Complex Litigation.
• Ken regularly serves as a panelist at national conferences addressing class action and complex litigation issues, as well as particular substantive issues, such as securities lending, contaminated products, cy pres and healthcare litigation.

State Court Admissions

• State of Illinois

Federal Court Admissions

• U.S. District Court, Northern District of Illinois
• U.S. District Court, Southern District of Illinois
• U.S. Court of Appeals, Second Circuit
• U.S. Court of Appeals, Third Circuit
• U.S. Court of Appeals, Sixth Circuit
• U.S. Court of Appeals, Seventh Circuit
• U.S. Court of Appeals, Tenth Circuit
• With so many of the firm’s cases pending in jurisdictions across the country, Ken has also entered appearances in United States District Courts of New York, Colorado, Maine, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Virginia, the District of Columbia, Missouri, Tennessee, Florida, New Mexico, Minnesota, Maryland, South Dakota, Connecticut, Ohio, California, and Wisconsin.

Academic Background

• J.D., Georgetown University Law Center, 1980
• B.A., summa cum laude, Washington University, 1977

Academic Leadership & Awards

• Recipient, Arnold J. Lien Prize in Political Science, 1977