Hon. Claire Cecchi

Claire Claudia Cecchi is an American lawyer and jurist serving as a United States district judge of the United States District Court for the District of New Jersey.

Education and Career

Born in Queens, Cecchi graduated from the Bronx High School of Science in 1982. She earned a Bachelor of Arts degree from Barnard College in 1986 and a Juris Doctor from the Fordham University School of Law in 1989. Following graduation from law school, Cecchi worked in the New York City Law Department, where she handled litigation matters. She was an associate at Robinson, St. John & Wayne from 1992 to 1996 and its successor firm, Robinson, Lapidus & Livelli in 1996. From 1997 to 2001, Cecchi was an associate at the firm of Carpenter, Bennett & Morrissey and a partner from 2001 to 2004. Between 2005 and 2006, she worked as a partner at McElroy, Deutsch, Mulvaney & Carpenter, LLP. Cecchi is a fellow of the American Bar Association, a director to the Historical Society of the United States District Court for the District of New Jersey, and a master of the William J. Brennan, Jr./Arthur T. Vanderbilt American Inn of Court.

Federal Judicial Service

On the recommendation of Senators Frank Lautenberg and Robert Menendez, Cecchi was nominated to the United States District Court for the District of New Jersey by President Barack Obama on December 1, 2010, to a seat vacated by Joseph A. Greenaway Jr. She received her commission on June 14, 2011.

Notable Cases

After almost nine years of litigation, on August 1, 2013, Judge Cecchi finally brought to a close one of the highest profile antitrust cases of the new millennium – In re Insurance Brokerage Litigation – with her approval of the final settlement in the action. The case, a consolidated multi-district litigation commenced in 2005 against insurance broker Marsh & McLennan and approximately two dozen of the nation’s largest insurers and brokers, was the outgrowth of an action brought by then-New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer against Marsh for allegedly soliciting payments from the insurers to steer business from their clients to those insurers. While the final settling defendants, which included Ace, Chubb and Munich Re, agreed to pay $10.5 million to resolve the case (with over $3 million going to plaintiff’s counsel), prior settlements in the case with Marsh, Zurich Insurance, AIG and several other insurers had netted plaintiffs over $250 million, with plaintiffs’ counsel receiving over $50 million in attorneys’ fees in those settlements.
A highly anticipated bellwether trial, which was set to begin in March, which will be the first Nexium lawsuit over kidney damage warnings to go before a jury in the U.S., has been postponed once again amid recent settlement discussions, and is now set to begin on June 5, 2023. The case is one of more than 13,000 lawsuits over proton pump inhibitors, which are a popular class of acid reflex and heartburn drugs, which includes Nexium, Prilosec, Protonix, Prevacid and others.