COSTA MESA (March 2, 2015) – Greenberg Gross LLP, the Costa Mesa firm launched in April 2013 by two Greenberg Traurig LLP shareholders who had grabbed national headlines with a $50 million jury verdict, announced that Evan C. Borges, a top trial lawyer with Irell & Manella for 15 years, will join the firm as partner.  Also joining Greenberg Gross is former Irell associate Michael P. McMahon.  With the addition of Borges and McMahon, the firm now has three star lawyers from Irell.

Alan Greenberg, the firm’s managing partner, said that he is extremely pleased with the addition of the Irell lawyers and that the firm’s immense and expanding workload has required the recruitment of top lateral candidates from the most prestigious law firms in the country: “Greenberg Gross is increasingly becoming the firm of choice for sophisticated plaintiffs and defendants in their most significant business litigation matters.  The firm therefore must continue to expand, but, given the nature and complexity of our work, must be extremely selective.  To attract the best legal talent, we not only pay top-of–the-market compensation, but also provide a dynamic and exciting environment with an exclusive focus on high-stakes trial work.  We have found that this combination serves as a gravitational pull to attract the best litigation talent.”

Borges joins the firm with more than 28 years of experience in complex litigation matters.  A 1985 graduate of Yale Law School, he began his career at Gibson Dunn & Crutcher.  Borges was subsequently recruited by the Bass Organization of Fort Worth, Texas, where he joined a team of private sector attorneys who liquidated billions of dollars in assets and liabilities of the former American Savings & Loan Association, which was then the largest savings and loan failure in U.S. history.  He thereafter joined a boutique bankruptcy firm as partner and became head of the firm’s litigation department.  In 2000, Borges joined Irell, where he practiced law for the past 15 years before joining Greenberg Gross.  At Irell, Borges served as lead counsel in numerous high-profile, national cases in federal and state courts across the United States.

The firm also has added associate Michael McMahon, who joins Greenberg Gross from Irell, where he was a member of the Litigation and Bankruptcy practice groups.  McMahon obtained his law degree in 2008 from the University of Chicago Law School, where he was a member of the Institute for Justice Clinic on Entrepreneurship, and obtained a B.A. in mathematics from Dartmouth College.

The hiring of Borges and McMahon is not the first time Greenberg Gross has recruited from Irell.  In June 2014, the firm hired Bret Hembd from the Century City office of Irell, where he specialized in commercial and intellectual property litigation. Hembd, like Borges, graduated from Yale Law School, where he served as editor of the Yale Law Journal.  Hembd is now thriving as a fifth-year associate at Greenberg Gross.  Mr. Greenberg explained why the firm finds that Irell lawyers are well-suited to succeed at Greenberg Gross: “Irell is correctly perceived as a firm where the attorneys are some of the most intellectually gifted in the country.  Our firm offers an attractive opportunity for such lawyers to maximize their considerable potential.  Our complex business litigation matters not only provide our lawyers with constant opportunities to engage in deep thought and nuanced analysis in the office, but also afford them with numerous opportunities to advocate in the courtroom.”  Indeed, since opening its doors, Greenberg Gross has won three significant trials and is scheduled to try six additional large-scale trials in 2015.  Greenberg explained:  “Unlike some firms, we relish the opportunity to take matters to trial.  We believe in the justice system and further believe that trial work is often the only way to achieve complete justice for clients.”
With the addition of the two new lawyers, Greenberg Gross has now attained a complement of eleven litigation attorneys.

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For additional information, please visit www.GGTrialLaw.com, or contact Wayne R. Gross: (949) 383-2810 / AGreenberg@GGTrialLaw.com.

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