Emma Gilmore

The Evidence Was in Brazil

The kickback scheme ran through one of the largest oil companies on earth, and the proof of it — the witnesses, the documents, the language they were written in — sat thousands of miles from the Southern District of New York.

Emma Gilmore went and got it. She deposed Petrobras's former chief executive, its former chief accountant, and the whistleblower whose information helped expose the scheme. She helped draft the complaint, then organized translated documents, foreign witness material, and transaction evidence into a form a United States federal court could evaluate — connecting events inside a Brazilian company to statements that reached global capital markets and to losses in specific investor accounts.

The work demanded precision at every layer. Because Petrobras equity and debt moved through different channels, each purchase had to be traced, security by security, to where it became binding under the Supreme Court's Morrison rule. Gilmore questioned central witnesses, defended others, and helped coordinate translations, custodians, expert disciplines, and transaction data into allocation, notice, and administration procedures that could actually deliver money.

The litigation culminated in $3 billion of court-supervised settlements — $2.95 billion from Petrobras and $50 million from auditor PwC Brazil — with the United Kingdom's Universities Superannuation Scheme serving as lead plaintiff and a class whose transactions, witnesses, and documents crossed national borders.

The Rule She Helped Write

Defendants asked the Second Circuit to make class certification harder — to require a freestanding showing of administrative feasibility before any class could be ascertained. Gilmore drafted the appellate brief opposing them.

In 2017, the court rejected the proposed test, holding that objective criteria and definite boundaries were enough. Gilmore then opposed the petition asking the Supreme Court to review the decision, and stayed on through the finish: she prevailed in the district court and again in the Second Circuit on sanctions against a professional objector who attacked the final resolution.

Three Billion Accounts

Gilmore led Pomerantz's Yahoo securities litigation with Jeremy Lieberman after the company's 2013 and 2014 data breaches. The 2013 theft affected all three billion Yahoo user accounts then in existence. Investors alleged the company misled the market about its cybersecurity and sat on the disclosures. During due diligence, her team located records indicating that the board and the then-chief executive had received updates about at least one breach. The case settled for $80 million after plaintiffs defeated dismissal.

Arconic and Deutsche Bank

In the Arconic case, Gilmore led the team confronting the company's product-safety, classification, and risk-control disclosures. Her lawyers developed evidence of earlier fires, product testing and classifications, and internal knowledge — additions that transformed the court's analysis of falsity, scienter, risk disclosure, and loss causation, making the distance between prior warning signs and later public statements legally visible. The court granted final approval in 2023 to a $74 million settlement, roughly twenty-two percent of estimated recoverable damages.

She also led the case testing Deutsche Bank's anti-money-laundering and know-your-customer controls against the conduct those programs were supposed to govern — the gap between the bank's public description of robust safeguards and its handling of clients it had itself classified as high risk. As sole lead counsel, Pomerantz obtained final approval in 2023 of a $26.25 million settlement, estimated at nearly half of likely recoverable damages.

Shaping the Doctrine

Gilmore's appellate work has moved the law itself. On the team that won a unanimous Ninth Circuit reversal in ChinaCast, she helped establish that a chief executive's scienter can be imputed to the corporation when he acts with apparent authority and investors rely on statements carrying the company's imprimatur — an issue of first impression in the circuit, anchored carefully to the executive's actual authority and corporate role.

In Strougo v. Barclays — a case about a private trading venue promoted as transparent and protected from predatory trading — she worked on the complaint and class-certification strategy. The Second Circuit affirmed certification, allowed investors to invoke the fraud-on-the-market presumption without proving that each new disclosure moved the share price, and placed the burden on defendants to disprove price impact by a preponderance of the evidence.

Then she took the fight to the Supreme Court's doorstep, organizing an amicus brief in Goldman Sachs Group v. Arkansas Teacher Retirement System signed by twenty-seven evidence scholars. In 2021, the Court held that defendants carry the burden of persuasion on lack of price impact and directed judges to weigh the specificity of the challenged statements.

Both Sides of the Table

Before Pomerantz, Gilmore practiced at Sullivan & Cromwell and Skadden and worked on the WorldCom securities litigation, which produced $2 billion in underwriter settlements. She clerked for Judge Thomas C. Platt, a former chief judge of the Eastern District of New York.

She graduated cum laude from Brooklyn Law School, served on the Brooklyn Law Review, and won CALI awards in evidence and discovery — after graduating summa cum laude from Arizona State University with a degree in French and a minor in business. She is admitted in New York, the United States Supreme Court, the Second, Sixth, and Ninth Circuits, and the Southern and Eastern Districts of New York.

While at Sullivan & Cromwell, Gilmore served on the legal team challenging Arkansas Act 1, which barred unmarried people living with a partner from adopting or serving as foster parents. In 2011, the Arkansas Supreme Court unanimously struck the ban down, removing a categorical barrier between children who needed permanent homes and adults qualified to provide them. She has also served on the New York City Bar Association's Securities Litigation Committee and Pomerantz's Anti-Harassment and Discrimination Committee.