Frankfurt Kurnit Klein & Selz

Jeremy Bates is Counsel to the Legal Ethics & Professional Responsibility and Litigation Groups. His practice focuses on lawyers and law firms and on commercial litigation.

Mr. Bates has 20 years of experience in state and federal courts and other dispute-resolution forums.  His work includes defending professional clients against claims for legal malpractice, litigation misconduct, breach of fiduciary duty, defamation, and fraud.  He also focuses on related legal-ethics work, handling fee disputes, representing attorneys in grievance matters, and acting for clients damaged by deposition misconduct or by conflicted lawyering.

In addition to professional-responsibility matters, Mr. Bates has represented plaintiffs and defendants in a broad range of litigations.  He has secured the dismissal of RICO, trademark, and computer-access claims.  He was hailed as a Law360 “Legal Lion” for helping convince the Commercial Division, New York County, to dismiss business-tort claims.  In a case arising out of a cross-border acquisition, he wrote a motion for sanctions that was granted by the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York.  And he has brought various disputes to successful conclusions through alternative resolutions and pre-litigation dispositions.

Before joining Frankfurt Kurnit, Mr. Bates was associated with the New York office of Sullivan & Cromwell LLP.  There he represented major financial institutions in litigations and in investigations by the SEC, the U.S. Department of Justice, and the New York Attorney General’s Office.  He was also counsel at Elman Freiberg PLLC, a litigation boutique specializing in representing lawyers, law firms, trustees, and beneficiaries.

In pro bono work, Mr. Bates challenged a federal prescription-drug regulation and won a substantial recovery for two Medicare Part D beneficiaries.  He obtained asylum status for a noncitizen who had suffered political violence abroad.  Mr. Bates has also represented prisoners in post-conviction proceedings before the New York Court of Appeals, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit, and the U.S. Supreme Court.

In government, Mr. Bates served as a legislative assistant to U.S. Senator Byron Dorgan and clerked for The Honorable Jacques L. Wiener, Jr., U.S. Circuit Judge for the Fifth Circuit.

Mr. Bates has written about various legal-ethics topics and has taught continuing-legal-education courses.  He served as a member of the New York City Bar Association Committee on Professional Ethics.  He is admitted to practice in New York.