Piercing the Corporate Veil: Pleading the New Standards and Reaching Sister Entities

Jeffrey M. Eilender, Co-Managing Partner | Schlam Stone & Dolan LLP

Jeffrey M. Eilender is the co-managing partner of Schlam Stone & Dolan LLP and co-chair of the firm’s civil litigation group. His commercial litigation practice centers on intra-corporate disputes and business separations, frequently in matters where the future of a company or an owner’s net assets is at risk. With nearly 30 years of litigation experience, he has represented companies, majority owners, and dissenting or oppressed minority owners in business divorce matters, and has prosecuted and defended derivative actions. He regularly serves as lead trial lawyer in federal court, the commercial divisions of New York’s state courts, arbitral forums, and other venues around the nation, including the Delaware Chancery Court.

• Education & Credentials

Mr. Eilender earned his J.D. from Columbia University Law School, where he was a Senior Editor of the Columbia Law Review, a Harlan Fisk Stone Scholar, and the winner of the Whitney North Seymour Medal for Trial Advocacy. He received his A.B. in History, magna cum laude, from Cornell University, where he was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. He is admitted to practice in New York and before the U.S. Courts of Appeals for the Second, Third, and Eleventh Circuits and the U.S. District Courts for the Southern and Eastern Districts of New York. He clerked for Hon. Charles M. Metzner of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York and Hon. Morton I. Greenberg of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit.

• Recognition & Leadership

Mr. Eilender has been selected to the New York Metro Super Lawyers list in Business Litigation, Civil Litigation, and General Litigation each year from 2010 through 2022. He holds firm-wide leadership roles at Schlam Stone & Dolan as co-managing partner and co-chair of the civil litigation group. Many of his business divorce matters have produced groundbreaking court rulings that are cited by other courts and are the subject of articles and blogs by other lawyers.

• Professional Involvement

Mr. Eilender is a member of the Commercial and Federal Litigation Section of the New York State Bar Association and co-chair of its New York State Judiciary Committee, and he has served on the Commercial Division (New York County) Advisory Committee, which advises on the Commercial Division’s practices. He is a member of the Association of the Bar of the City of New York, the Federal Bar Council, and the American Bar Association, including the Business Divorce and Private Company sub-committee of its Business Law Section. A frequent lecturer at the New York State Bar’s Commercial Litigation Academy, he edits and writes the firm’s New York Commercial Division Blog and contributed to Bloomberg BNA’s 2017 Supplement to Litigating the Business Divorce.

• Experience

Mr. Eilender litigates business conflicts of virtually every kind, including real estate, contract, intellectual property, trade secrets, employment, fraud, and other business tort cases. His clients have included large public entities, family businesses, and high net-worth individuals and celebrities such as AXA, Verizon, Oath (formerly AOL), ALP, Inc., Judith Regan, Perez Hilton, the Chetrit real estate family, the Lighthouse Group, Albert Einstein Medical School, Canon, and Ashkenazy Acquisition Corp. Representative results include successfully defending bluebird bio’s right to commercialize its billion-dollar gene therapy for thalassemia at trial; a $200 million lawsuit for global insurance giant AXA against ING in the Commercial Division of New York County Supreme Court; the trial and appeal that produced Chiu v. Chiu, 125 A.D.3d 824 (2d Dep’t 2015), a significant decision limiting use of the marketability discount for real estate holding entities; a $30 million arbitration award for a New York importer against its Chinese manufacturing partner; and a $13 million buyout for a minority LLC member in a dissolution proceeding in the Commercial Division of Nassau County Supreme Court. He began his career as a litigation associate at Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison LLP.

Session 1 – Pleading and Proving Veil Piercing Under the 2025–2026 State Court Standards | 1:00pm – 2:00pm

This session examines the latest state court and Supreme Court developments governing how veil-piercing claims must be pleaded and proved in 2025 and 2026, with focused analysis of divergent statutory and common-law standards across Texas, Tennessee, New York, North Carolina, and the federal courts. Attorneys will learn how to distinguish entity-specific pathways, plead supporting facts rather than bare factors, and map corporate structures before filing. Participants will leave with a jurisdiction-by-jurisdiction framework for drafting veil-piercing allegations that survive motions to dismiss under current standards.

Break | 2:00pm – 2:10pm

Session 2 – Reverse Veil Piercing and Reaching Sister Entities in Judgment Enforcement | 2:10pm – 3:10pm

This session examines the doctrines of reverse veil piercing and horizontal (enterprise) liability as tools for reaching corporate affiliates and sister entities during post-judgment enforcement. Attorneys will work through the 2025 Second Circuit decision in Citibank v. Aralpa, the Supreme Court’s Dewberry ruling, and the Pennsylvania Supreme Court’s Mortimer enterprise liability framework to understand when and how these theories apply across key jurisdictions. Attendees will leave able to identify the correct theory for a given enforcement posture, navigate the charging-order exclusivity defense, and build a post-judgment discovery strategy to support reverse piercing claims.