Michael B. Eisenkraft
Securities · Antitrust · Market Structure · Financial Products
The lesson is that ‘everything’ means everything. If you want to cut something out, you have to say so.
The Private Case Came First
The biggest antitrust cases usually follow the government: prosecutors indict, regulators fine, and the civil bar arrives to collect on facts already found. The stock-lending litigation had none of that. No indictment, no consent decree, no agency report supplying the central facts.
Michael B. Eisenkraft helped lead investor-side litigation alleging that major banks jointly resisted stock-lending platforms that would have permitted direct trading and greater price transparency — and his team built the case from nothing but the market itself. A stock loan begins when an investor or intermediary lends shares, often to facilitate a short sale or settlement, in a market that long depended on dealer relationships and limited price transparency. Public retirement systems and other buy-side investors were the plaintiffs; the raw material was market rules, ownership relationships, communications, platform efforts, and transaction economics, reconstructed from participant evidence. At final approval, the district judge noted that counsel had begun at ground level and described the litigation as particularly complex.
On September 4, 2024, the court approved settlements totaling approximately $580 million with six defendants. The agreements also required EquiLend to adopt an antitrust code, annual certifications, compliance reporting, training, restrictions on confidential-information access, board-term limits, and oversight by outside antitrust counsel. Those provisions established new transparency obligations for the market.
Brown, Harvard, and the Second Circuit
Eisenkraft graduated from Brown University and Harvard Law School and clerked for Judge Barrington D. Parker of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit — the court that would later hear some of his most consequential appeals. He is admitted in New York and New Jersey.
At Cohen Milstein, Eisenkraft leads the firm's efforts in prosecuting innovative cases protecting financial markets and investors, and he holds a rare dual seat as a partner in both the Antitrust and the Securities Litigation & Investor Protection practices. He is the administrative partner of the New York office, chairs the New Business Development Committee, and serves on the firm's Executive Committee. In 2018, he helped secure preliminary approval of a $165 million mortgage-backed-securities settlement and persuaded the Second Circuit to revive a lawsuit concerning Korean futures contracts.
Interest-Rate Swaps
Interest-rate swaps let market participants exchange fixed and floating payment obligations; pension funds, municipalities, and endowments use them to manage interest-rate exposure. Eisenkraft was among the Cohen Milstein lawyers representing investors in litigation challenging the structure of over-the-counter interest-rate-swap trading and the barriers to all-to-all electronic platforms, with the Public School Teachers' Pension and Retirement Fund of Chicago and the Los Angeles County Employees Retirement Association serving as plaintiffs.
The asserted harm turned on market access: dealer banks could trade electronically with one another while customers lacked comparable routes. Once again the team developed the action independently, examining trading architecture, dealer communications, transaction records, platform access, quoted prices, clearing, and spreads — who could request a price, who could provide one, what information was visible, and what the spreads on large swaps cost the funds that pay teachers' pensions. The court appointed Cohen Milstein and co-counsel interim co-lead counsel in 2016, and in July 2025 approved settlements totaling $71 million with the settling banks. Eisenkraft helped define the affected trades, coordinate the claims, and present the agreements, allocation terms, and supporting market record for final review.
The Night Volatility Broke a Product
Credit Suisse's XIV exchange-traded notes offered inverse exposure to market volatility — a product that made money when markets stayed calm — and collapsed after the February 2018 volatility spike. Eisenkraft represents investors in the litigation that followed, work that has required mastering the note's formula, hedging demands, acceleration provisions, after-hours liquidity, redemption mechanics, disclosures, trading records, and investor-loss evidence.
A Securities Act class had already been certified. In February 2025, the district court also certified a market-manipulation class, finding that common market evidence supported collective treatment. Eisenkraft's contribution was architectural: separating the investor theories and matching each to the relevant product mechanics, investor group, and common proof, so that two very different claims could each stand on its own record.
Three Pools of Mortgages
Eisenkraft's mortgage-backed-securities work — NovaStar, Harborview, and RALI — traces the financial crisis at the level where it actually happened: loan by loan, pool by pool, offering by offering.
NovaStar survived an earlier dismissal on appeal and later resolved for $165 million, with final approval in 2019. Harborview produced a $275 million settlement approved in 2014. RALI concluded after seven years with a $335 million global settlement approved in 2015. Each required analysis of loan pools, offering documents, originators, underwriters, investor transactions, experts, class definitions, and allocation, tracing loans from origination and review through pooling, underwriting, public offering, and purchase by the represented investors. The three proceedings stayed separate — different offerings, defendants, purchasers, documents, and allocation records — and together produced settlements totaling $775 million for investors sold certificates whose representations did not match the loans behind them.
A Docket Across Markets
The same method now runs across an unusually wide docket. Alongside the stock-lending, swaps, and XIV matters, Eisenkraft represents investors in securities litigation against Block, Inc., and in antitrust class litigation he represents farmers against pesticide companies, casinos against the manufacturer of automatic card shufflers, self-funded payors against a major hospital system, and app developers against Apple. Different industries, one question: how a market's structure quietly takes money from the people who depend on it.
His practice applies market-structure analysis to asset-backed certificates, volatility notes, stock-loan transactions, and interest-rate swaps — connecting financial mechanisms to investor transactions, common proof, class treatment, and court-approved relief. Where other lawyers wait for the government to map the misconduct, Eisenkraft draws the map himself.