Clement J. Farley is a Partner and was the Chair of the Bankruptcy & Commercial Litigation Group from 2007 to 2016. As a highly-experienced litigator of complex commercial matters, Clement has been with McCarter & English since 1995, after completing a Clerkship with the Honorable Gary S. Stein of the New Jersey Supreme Court, and graduating with High Honors and earning Order of the Coif from Rutgers School of Law—Newark.
With nearly 25 years’ experience, Clement is regionally recognized as an accomplished and diversified litigator, handling matters in many areas of commercial and business litigation, including prosecution and defense of director-and-officer fiduciary-duty claims, disputes involving shareholders, limited-liability members, and partners, complex real-estate matters, and several other types of contract and business-tort litigation.
Clement also has considerable knowledge and experience in creditor-debtor matters, including inter-creditor-agreements disputes, lender-liability defense, fraudulent-conveyance litigation, Ponzi and fraud schemes (e.g., multiple matters involving Solomon Dwek, Eliyahu Weinstein, Marc Dreier, and Taylor, Bean & Whitaker/Lee Farkas), consumer-defense and retail-banking litigation, loan workouts, business restructurings, foreclosures, and asset recovery.
Clement represents individuals and all types of business associations, across the spectrum from small, to mid-sized, to large entities in numerous industries. He has done so in litigation, bankruptcy, state-insolvency proceedings, arbitration, mediation, government- and administrative-agency proceedings, and out-of-court contexts, in various state and federal courts, and at trial and appellate levels. Clement has tried multiple cases in various courts, and successfully handled and argued numerous appeals, benefiting from the experience and insight gained from his Supreme Court Clerkship.
Clement represents clients in bet-the-company litigation, and his clients have described him as very smart, tough, extremely prepared, reasonable, and devoted to achieving his client’s unquestioned success. His clients frequently call and rely on him in crisis situations.
Clement has worked on more than 40 cases in which published decisions have issued, some of the most recent of which are: In re Taylor, Bean & Whitaker Mortgage Corp., 2018 WL 5784699 (M.D. Fla. Bankr. Nov. 1, 2018); Intrepid Investments, LLC v. Selling Source, LLC, 86 N.Y.S.3d 463 (App. Div. 1st Dep’t 2018); Lakewood v. Castro, Secretary of Dep’t of Housing & Urban Development, 2017 WL 1228731(D.N.J. April 3, 2017); and Moche v. Levy, 2015 WL 10710974 (N.J. App. Div. April 22, 2016).
Clement has published several articles on timely topics for leading publications, as well as for McCarter’s client alerts. He co-authored the New Jersey Law Journal article, “The ‘Per-Debtor’ Interpretation of Chapter 11,” and the New York Law Journal article, “Re-Thinking the Treatment of Withdrawal Liability in Bankruptcy.” Clement also has been a featured speaker at numerous CLE events and client seminars on topics such as New Jersey and New York foreclosure practice, asset recovery, judgment collection, retail-banking and lender-liability litigation; and preparing fact and expert witnesses for deposition and trial, defending them at deposition and trial, and conducting their examinations at deposition and trial.
Clement was a member of the District VA Ethics Committee, and served on the New Jersey Supreme Court Commission on the Rules of Professional Conduct (RPCs) analyzing and proposing in its Report to the Supreme Court changes to New Jersey’s RPCs. The Commission and its Report stemmed from proposed rule changes of the American Bar Association to its Model Rules.
