Primary Job Title Founder & Chairman Primary Organization 
Hausfeld LLP
Location Washington, District of Columbia, United States Regions Washington DC Metro Area, Southern US Gender Male
Michael Hausfeld, widely recognized for his leadership on competition matters and his groundbreaking cases in human rights law, is Chair Emeritus. Michael’s distinguished career has included some of the largest and most successful class actions in the fields of human rights, discrimination and antitrust law. Michael has an abiding interest in
social reform, and has been a part of some of the most groundbreaking cases in that arena both in the U.S. and around the world. Michael was among the first lawyers in the U.S. to assert that sexual harassment was a form of discrimination prohibited by Title VII, and he successfully tried the first case establishing that principle. He has represented Native Alaskans whose lives were affected by the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill and later negotiated a then-historic $176 million settlement from Texaco, Inc. in a racial-bias discrimination case. In Friedman v. Union Bank of Switzerland, Michael represented a class of Holocaust victims whose assets were wrongfully retained by private Swiss banks during and after World War II. The case raised novel issues of international banking law and international human rights law. In a separate case, he also successfully represented the Republic of Poland, the Czech Republic, the Republic of Belarus, the Republic of Ukraine and the Russian Federation on issues of slave and forced labor for both Jewish and non-Jewish victims of Nazi persecution. He has represented individuals and NGOs in litigation alleging liability for aiding and abetting the South African system of apartheid.
