After five years of litigation and a trip to the highest court in the land, Weil won a decisive victory in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit for the Sears Liquidating Trust. The Court of Appeals held that the Trust retains ownership of a 100-year lease to a 160,000 square-foot property in the iconic Mall of America, which the Mall had tried to claw back.

During Sears’ chapter 11 bankruptcy proceeding, Sears assigned the lease to a third party. The assignment was later vacated, following a U.S. Supreme Court decision that overruled prior Second Circuit precedent. On remand from the Supreme Court, the Mall claimed that the lease should revert to the Mall as landlord under Section 365(d)(4) of the Bankruptcy Code. The Second Circuit rejected that argument, agreeing with the district court that the valuable lease now belongs to the Sears Liquidating Trust.

The Weil team was led by the Co-Head of Weil’s Complex Commercial Litigation and Appeals and Strategic Counseling practices, Greg Silbert, who argued the appeal, and included partner Garrett Fail, partner-elect Jennifer Crozier, and associates Camilla Brandfield-Harvey and Amar Adam.