McGuireWoods is bolstering its litigation team in New York with the addition of partner Stephen Foresta, who brings more than three decades of experience representing clients in business disputes, insurance recovery matters and product liability actions.
Foresta joins McGuireWoods from Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe, where he led its global business litigation unit from 2011 to 2016 and chaired its life settlements working group. He represents investors in life settlement-related disputes, including cost-of-insurance rate increases, enforcement of contestability clauses, and claims of elder abuse, fraud and unfair competition.
His litigation experience includes representing a Saudi engineering firm before the Swiss Chambers’ Arbitration Institution in a 2017 dispute with six separate entities over oil and gas plants in the Persian Gulf region. He also represented Sony and several affiliated companies in litigation arising from the 2011 data breach of Sony’s online gaming network, one of the first major cases to address data breach insurance coverage.
Foresta is the sixth partner to join McGuireWoods’ growing New York office this year, following the arrivals of life sciences patent litigators Benjamin Hsing, Wanda French-Brown and Irene Hudson, M&A dealmaker Colin Bumby and aviation finance lawyer Deepak Reddy. Restructuring lawyer Kristin Wigness also joined the New York office as senior counsel last month.
Outside of his law practice, Foresta serves on the board of directors of Indego Africa, a nonprofit enterprise that educates artisan women in Ghana and Rwanda to help them market their products. He also chairs the New York Board of Advisors of Disability Rights Advocates, one of the nation’s leading nonprofit legal centers serving people with disabilities.