The Miami ABL member firm Raso Klock Perez & Nieto will open an office in Manhattan and has hired internationally known arbitral and  complex litigation attorney Read McCaffrey to head its international litigation group. 

McCaffrey, who was counsel at Liddle & Robinson in New York until the middle of last month, had been a senior litigation partner and the commercial litigation chair at Patton Boggs in Washington, D.C. for 24 years. But he moved his litigation practice to New York in 2015 after Patton Boggs consolidated its practice with Cleveland-based Squires Sanders in 2014.

McCaffrey joins Rasco Klock as of counsel and will split his time between New York and Miami, said Ramón Rasco, the firm's founder and managing partner. The New York office is scheduled to open in June.

McCaffrey has been lead or co-lead counsel in complex commercial litigation for over 40 years in state and federal courts throughout the U.S. and before arbitral tribunals in The Hague, Paris, Genevad and London.

The Eastern District of New York appointed him to serve from 1996 to 2008 on a five-lawyer plaintiffs' committee representing the interests of families of people who died aboard Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, in their claims against the Libyan government. In 2010 he worked with Sir Claude Hankes, financial adviser to the Iraqi government and the Trade Bank of Iraq following the U.N. oil-for-food scandal, to help recover money.

He has a number of clients in New York, as does another attorney that Rasco said would be joining the firm soon. The Manhattan office will allow the firm to best accommodate those clients, Rasco said. 

Discussions about McCaffrey joining the Coral Gables -based firm arose after McCaffrey and firm name partner Joseph Klock Jr. ran into each other last year. The two had worked together, and against each other, in the past. Klock introduced McCaffrey to Rasco and the lawyers hit it off.

"Read brings to our firm decades of experience in assisting global companies in 'looking over the horizon' to assess risks prior to a new venture, entering a new market or a potential merger or acquisition', Rasco said, calling McCaffrey's expertise "very highly" valued by sophisticated clients.

Source: New York Law Journal