Jeroen van Kwawegen

Johnson Van Kwawegen

Van Kwawegen is the co-founding partner of Johnson Van Kwawegen LLP, known as JVK Law. The firm represents investors in shareholder and securities litigation from offices in New York, Delaware, and California. His practice concerns disclosure, fiduciary duty, corporate oversight, board conduct, and the claims of public pension funds and other institutional investors.

JVK launched in December 2025 with a group drawn from an established corporate-governance and securities team. The firm advises investor clients and litigates securities and governance matters through discovery, expert work, trial preparation, settlement, or judgment. At JVK, the partners who evaluate a claim also direct the discovery and retain responsibility for trial preparation and court proceedings — the case never changes hands on its way to the courtroom.

Van Kwawegen has served in lead or co-lead roles across markedly different investor actions. FirstEnergy involved derivative claims and governance relief; Wells Fargo concerned a purchaser class and public-company disclosures; Credit Suisse required a recovery for the corporation itself. His responsibilities in each ran from claim structure through discovery, settlement terms, approval proceedings, and appellate review.

FirstEnergy

The FirstEnergy matter arose after a public corruption scheme tied the company to payments made for favorable Ohio legislation. Shareholders brought derivative claims on the corporation’s behalf against current and former executives. Van Kwawegen’s team defeated a motion to dismiss, obtained substantial discovery, and secured a $180 million insurer-funded derivative recovery together with corporate-governance reforms.

The discovery effort was exhaustive. Plaintiffs served multiple sets of requests, received more than 500,000 pages, obtained the materials the company had produced to federal enforcement agencies, and subpoenaed third parties — assembling the record a court needs before it can credit a governance remedy.

The settlement required the departure of six directors, active board oversight of political spending and lobbying, and specified proxy disclosures. An expert declaration submitted with the agreement explained how those measures were designed to reduce the chance that the identified conduct would ever recur — reform engineered to the facts, not boilerplate.

The district court approved the agreement, and the Sixth Circuit affirmed. Van Kwawegen led the action through pleading, discovery, settlement design, approval, and appellate review. The final result paired cash for the corporation with enforceable changes to how its board actually governs.

Wells Fargo

The Wells Fargo securities class action concerned statements about the bank’s progress complying with government consent orders and the likelihood that a regulatory asset cap would be lifted. Investors alleged that public assurances overstated the pace and effectiveness of remediation. The complaint wove regulatory history, executive statements, corrective disclosures, and market reactions into a single, coherent theory of investor loss.

The case resolved for $1 billion — the largest securities class action recovery in the United States in 2023 and among the largest ever. The settlement defined the purchaser class, the released claims, the allocation process, and the conditions for final judgment. Van Kwawegen served in a lead role throughout, as the matter proceeded through contested motions, discovery, mediation, settlement terms, and approval.

Because the claim belonged to purchasers rather than to the corporation, the remedy was a fund for eligible investors — the form following the ownership of the claim, as it must.

Credit Suisse

The Credit Suisse derivative action focused on risk oversight at the highest level of the bank. The claims alleged that directors and senior officers failed to maintain adequate controls while Credit Suisse absorbed major losses and compliance failures — including the collapses of Archegos Capital Management and Greensill Capital — in the years before its forced merger with UBS. The matter proceeded in New York state court on behalf of the corporation, led by the Employees Retirement System for the City of Providence.

Through three years of contested litigation, Van Kwawegen’s team developed board materials and expert explanations of the bank’s governance systems. The record traced information flows, warning signs, committee work, controls, and decisions — a granular account of how risks were escalated, evaluated, and governed, and where the system gave way.

The resolution produced a $115 million insurer-funded payment to UBS as Credit Suisse’s successor — the largest derivative oversight recovery in the history of the New York state courts. Van Kwawegen led the action, and the court entered final approval and judgment in July 2026.

Investor and Governance Practice

Across FirstEnergy, Wells Fargo, and Credit Suisse, Van Kwawegen’s responsibilities included case leadership, discovery, settlement design, approval, appellate defense, and governance implementation. FirstEnergy paired a corporate cash recovery with director departures and political-spending oversight. Wells Fargo created a direct recovery path for eligible purchasers. Credit Suisse returned value to the corporation through an oversight claim litigated in a state forum. Each matter required the claim, the beneficiary, the supporting evidence, and the remedy to be defined separately — and each definition held.

Public pension funds and other fiduciaries require assessments of jurisdiction, standing, leadership, discovery, duration, and potential recovery. They also require reporting that permits investment and legal officers to evaluate continued litigation against a negotiated settlement. Van Kwawegen’s practice is built around exactly that discipline: client-centered analysis first, litigation strategy in its service.

Van Kwawegen serves on the advisory board of Columbia Law School’s Millstein Center for Global Markets and Corporate Ownership and on the advisory board of the Institute for Law and Economics at Penn Carey Law, and he serves on the board of Legal Services NYC, which provides legal assistance to more than one hundred thousand New Yorkers in need each year. He speaks regularly at law schools including Berkeley, Columbia, and Harvard and at investor forums, and he has co-authored academic and professional articles on governance and investor rights. His advisory work engages capital markets, corporate ownership, board accountability, disclosure, and fiduciary stewardship.