Joseph A. Fonti

Hours Before the Summary-Judgment Deadline

The Teva litigation ran five years, and nearly every one of those years was contested.

Ontario Teachers' Pension Plan Board and the Anchorage Police and Fire Retirement System alleged that Teva executives concealed a multiyear scheme built on enormous generic-drug price increases and coordination with competitors — a scheme whose eventual exposure devastated the stock. The court appointed Bleichmar Fonti & Auld sole lead counsel, with Fonti and his co-founding partner Javier Bleichmar directing the case.

The work required separating the investor class's claims from a thicket of parallel proceedings and building a securities-specific theory of disclosure, loss, class scope, and damages that could survive on its own evidence. The district court preserved the central claims at the pleading stage. The class was certified. The Second Circuit declined to disturb the certification. Then came the long middle of the case — the fact discovery, the expert discovery, the grinding preparation that decides these matters — with summary-judgment motions looming as the next test.

The parties agreed to a $420 million settlement hours before those motions were due. Chief Judge Stefan Underhill granted final approval on June 2, 2022, without a single objection.

The Firm That Kept Its Case

The Computer Sciences litigation put an unusual question to a federal judge: what happens to a class when its lawyers leave to start their own firm?

Ontario Teachers' served as lead plaintiff in claims concerning a multibillion-dollar contract with the United Kingdom's National Health Service and the adequacy of the company's internal controls — another case on the Eastern District of Virginia's unforgiving calendar. Fonti, Bleichmar, and Dominic Auld built the case, and as trial approached, the parties reached a $97.5 million settlement. Under the plaintiff's damages analysis, that cash fund represented as much as thirty-eight percent of the damages recoverable at trial — an extraordinary fraction in a field where single-digit recoveries are common.

The court granted final approval to the $97.5 million settlement in September 2013. When Fonti, Bleichmar, and Dominic Auld founded Bleichmar Fonti & Auld in 2014, Ontario Teachers' chose to continue with the same lawyers. The court approved the new firm's role as counsel, preserving the team's representation of the class.

Restoring a Case on Appeal

Some victories create recoveries. Others create the possibility of one.

In the Celestica securities litigation, the investors' claims had been dismissed, and the case's survival came down to an argument in the Second Circuit. Fonti argued the appeal and won a decision applying the scienter pleading standard in the investors' favor — restoring claims that had been dead.

Then he did the less glamorous half of the job. After remand, he developed the evidence, obtained class certification, and argued both the class-certification and summary-judgment motions. The district court approved a $30 million settlement in July 2015. The appellate ruling opened the door; the years of work afterward carried the class through it.

His appellate and complex-evidence work runs through his earlier career as well: the Broadcom options-backdating litigation, which resolved for $173.5 million; the $671 million HealthSouth recovery; and the Weatherford litigation, where he took trial testimony from third-party accountants and consultants who would not be available for trial, helping produce a $120 million recovery built substantially on complex accounting proof.

The Board That Paid the Company Back

The derivative action against Tesla's directors began with a pension fund in Detroit and ended with the largest derivative settlement in the history of the Delaware Court of Chancery.

The Police and Fire Retirement System of the City of Detroit alleged that Tesla's directors awarded themselves excessive compensation from 2017 through 2020 — years when the stock's rise made the option grants extraordinarily valuable. Because the claims were derivative, any recovery would flow not to the shareholders who sued but into Tesla itself. Fonti led BFA's prosecution of the case alongside firm partners and co-counsel, against a board that included some of the most prominent names in American business.

The settlement required the directors to return to Tesla the value of more than 3.1 million options — worth over $735 million under the agreed valuation — surrender unexercised options, forgo their compensation for 2021 through 2023, accept limits on future pay, and implement governance reforms controlling how director compensation would be set for the next five years. The plaintiffs valued the combined monetary and governance relief at approximately $919 million. The Court of Chancery approved the package, and in January 2026 the Delaware Supreme Court affirmed, cementing every element of the relief for the company.

A derivative case of that scale asks a fundamental question — whether the people at the top of a corporation can be made to answer to it — and the affirmed settlement answered it in dollars, in canceled options, and in rules that outlast the litigation.

Practice and Background

Fonti co-founded Bleichmar Fonti & Auld and leads its United States securities-litigation practice. For more than two decades he has represented pension systems, asset managers, and other institutional investors — including several of Canada's most significant pension systems — in securities class actions, direct actions, appeals, and derivative matters. He began his career at Sullivan & Cromwell, representing Fortune 500 companies before crossing to the investor side, an early vantage point on how the defense builds its cases that has informed how he takes them apart.

He earned both his undergraduate and law degrees from New York University. He is admitted in New York and Connecticut, before the United States Supreme Court, and before the U.S. Courts of Appeals for the First, Fourth, Ninth, and Tenth Circuits, as well as federal district courts in New York.