Author: Bailey Glasser

Katherine Charonko Named Winner of the Monica Bay Women of Legal Tech Award

Kate will be honored at the sixth annual Legalweek Leaders in Tech Law Awards and Dinner on Monday, March 9, 2026, during the Legalweek 2026 conference in New York.

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Katherine E. Charonko, Bailey & Glasser, LLP’s Electronically Stored Information & Technology Practice Group Leader, has been named a winner of the Monica Bay Women of Legal Tech Award, an award given by ALM / LegalTech News. Ms. Charonko is a litigator whose work directly creates life-changing results for people harmed by dangerous products in some of the largest product liability and mass tort cases in the country.

Named after the former editor-in-chief of Legaltech News, the Monica Bay Award honors women at law firms, legal departments, and legal technology or legal service companies who have achieved notable successes and made significant contributions to legal innovation. Kate will be honored at the sixth annual Legalweek Leaders in Tech Law Awards and Dinner on Monday, March 9, 2026, during the Legalweek 2026 conference in New York.

Ms. Charonko plays a central role in many of Bailey Glasser’s most consequential matters, including on litigation teams taking on the world’s most powerful corporations, such as Johnson & Johnson, 3M, Volkswagen, Toyota, Bayer/Monsanto, and major medical device manufacturers. Her assistance is routinely sought by national trial teams, strengthened by her and Bailey Glasser’s strong reputation and her global Certified E-Discovery Specialist (CEDS) credential. Ms. Charonko has been appointed to numerous MDL leadership roles, serving as liaison director of e-Discovery and ESI, directing the management and review of billions of documents across multiple parties and jurisdictions. Across every dimension of her work, Ms. Charonko stands out for her technical brilliance and unwavering commitment to the people she and Bailey Glasser serve.

Ms. Charonko leads, speaks, and writes on cutting-edge topics, including being a member of the Sedona Conference and Women En Masse, and recently spoke at the November 2025 Trial Lawyers of Mass Torts Summit (including its Women’s Summit). She recently published “From Code to Canvas: the Intellectual Property Debate in Generative AI Creations,” as a guest columnist in the Daily Journal on November 3, 2025.

BG Partner Sharon Iskra Presenting at WVAJ Mid-Winter Convention

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Bailey Glasser partner Sharon Iskra will be a featured panelist at the West Virginia Association for Justice 2026 Mid-Winter Convention & Seminar where she will be presenting in the “Achieving Accountability and Justice: Representing Victims of Physical and Sexual Abuse” program.

Sharon tenaciously litigates cases across the country on behalf of children, individuals with special needs, and others who have been abused, neglected, or exploited in institutions such as schools, daycare centers, juvenile facilities, group homes, rehabilitation centers, foster care facilities, and other settings. Within the American Association for Justice, she is active in the Child Sexual Abuse, Sexual Assault, and Anti-Human Trafficking Litigation Groups, and designed and hosted a CLE-approved webinar series to teach lawyers how to improve their representation of abuse survivors. Sharon is also a leader in fighting abuse at home in West Virginia, centering her practice on these matters while serving on the Human Trafficking Task Force of West Virginia and on the Board of Directors for the West Virginia Association of Justice.

Sharon leads the Institutional Abuse & Neglect team at Bailey Glasser, focusing on individual matters while also working on behalf of hundreds of former juveniles in Maryland who were abused in juvenile hall facilities. Sharon’s advocacy on behalf of abuse survivors has earned her recognition by Best Lawyers in America®, by Lawdragon as a Leading Civil Rights & Plaintiff Employment Lawyers, and more.

For more, visit this link.

Tad Duree Authors Litigation Funding Article for ABA Law Practice Today

Third-party litigation funding has transformed how law firms finance cases—but it comes with serious ethical considerations that aren’t always clear or obvious.

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Third-party litigation funding has transformed how law firms finance cases—but it comes with serious ethical considerations that aren’t always clear or obvious. Bailey Glasser partner Tad Duree authored an article for the American Bar Association Law Practice Today about what lawyers need to know about attorney independence, client confidentiality, and navigating litigation funding agreements.

Read it here.

Bailey Glasser Heads Back to Supreme Court for Intel ERISA Appeal

The plaintiffs allege that the defendants mismanaged retirement plan assets by stuffing target date funds in the Intel plans with expensive, opaque, and esoteric private equity and hedge fund investments. These outlier investments caused Intel employees to lose hundreds of millions of dollars in retirement savings.

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The Supreme Court of the United States granted the petition for certiorari filed by Bailey & Glasser, LLP and co-counsel on behalf of clients Winston Anderson and Christopher Sulyma in their ongoing case against the Intel Corporation and the Intel fiduciaries responsible for investing Intel’s retirement plans. The plaintiffs allege that the defendants mismanaged retirement plan assets by stuffing target date funds in the Intel plans with expensive, opaque, and esoteric private equity and hedge fund investments. These outlier investments caused Intel employees to lose hundreds of millions of dollars in retirement savings.

Gregory Porter, BG’s ERISA Practice Group Leader and leading co-counsel in this case, said, “This case presents a critical opportunity to clarify how courts evaluate fiduciary decision-making in complex retirement-plan investments, particularly as plans increasingly incorporate alternative and nontraditional assets.”

In addition to Greg Porter, the petition was filed by Bailey Glasser’s nationally recognized ERISA litigation team, which includes partners Mark Boyko and Ryan Jenny, as well as co-counsel from Gupta Wessler LLP and The Barton Firm LLP.

Plaintiffs, long-time Intel employees and participants in the company’s retirement plans, allege that Intel’s plan fiduciaries violated their duties of prudence and loyalty under the Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974 (ERISA). The complaint contends that the fiduciaries invested billions of dollars of plan assets in unproven, high-risk, and illiquid alternative investments, such as hedge funds and private equity, through custom target-date and multi-asset funds, exposing participants to unnecessary risk and underperformance relative to traditional retirement investment options.

The U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California dismissed the case, holding that the complaint did not plausibly allege imprudence or disloyalty because it failed to identify “meaningful benchmarks” for comparing the Intel funds’ performance. In May 2025, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit affirmed, concluding that ERISA plaintiffs must identify comparator funds with similar objectives, risks, and rewards to support claims of imprudent investment even when no such benchmark exists because no similarly-situated fiduciaries embarked on such reckless conduct.

Read more here.

Bailey Glasser Defeats Occidental Petroleum’s Motions to Dismiss Toxic Tort Lawsuit

Our team is fighting on behalf of two clients poisoned by toxic clouds of incinerated chemical-laden wastewater in Petrolia, Pennsylvania.

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On behalf of two clients poisoned by toxic clouds of incinerated chemical-laden wastewater in Petrolia, Pennsylvania, Bailey & Glasser, LLP (“Bailey Glasser”) successfully defeated two Motions to Dismiss (in Pennsylvania these motions are called “demurrers”) in a lawsuit pending in Butler County, Pennsylvania. The matter will now proceed to discovery.

The litigation team in this case is led by partner Michael “Mickey” Robb, partner Travis A. Prince, and associate Timothy Leckenby. The defendants in the case include Beazer USA, INDSPEC Chemical Corporation, Koppers, Inc., Interstate Chemical Company, Occidental Chemical Corporation, and Occidental Petroleum Corporation, and others.

The facts of this case are as follows:

The Petrolia Chemical Plant (owned by the Occidental Chemical Corporation) was one of the biggest manufacturers of resorcinol until 2017. The biggest use of resorcinol is in the rubber and tire industry as an adhesive to bond rubber to steel. The plant manufactured approximately 50 million pounds of resorcinol every year.

To create resorcinol, the plant generated million of gallons of wastewater every year which was collected and incinerated in a high pressure reactor. Because various chemicals, salts, and chlorides were in each batch of wastewater it incinerated, the process created dangerous toxins in the form of dioxins and dibenzofurans to exit the reactor’s smoke stack which ironically is lower in height than almost all of the homes that surround the plant in the small, industrial town.

To read the Amended Complaint and learn more, please visit this link.