ABOUT
E. NORMAN VEASEY joined the Wilmington law firm of Gordon, Fournaris & Mammarella, P.A. in January 2014. He is the former Chief Justice of the Delaware Supreme Court, having served a 12-year term through May 2004. After his retirement from the Supreme Court, he was a Senior Partner at Weil, Gotshal & Manges LLP, until the end of 2013.
At GFM, he serves as an arbitrator, mediator, special master, counsellor, as well as providing other services in complex corporate, contract, and commercial transactions and litigation. Chief Justice Veasey is listed on the National Roster of Arbitrators and Mediators of the American Arbitration Association (AAA) and as a distinguished neutral of the Institute for Conflict Prevention and Resolution (CPR). In 2015 he was selected as the Delaware member of the newly-created AAA Master Mediator Panel for the Northeast in large, complex, commercial cases.
During his tenure as Chief Justice, and thereafter, the United States Chamber of Commerce ranked Delaware’s courts first in the nation for their fair, reasonable, and efficient litigation environment. Chief Justice Veasey has been credited with leading nationwide programs to restore professionalism to the practice of law and to adopt best practices in the running of America’s courts. In 2004, his final year of service in the Delaware Supreme Court, he was awarded the Order of the First State by the Governor of Delaware, the highest honor for meritorious service the State’s governor can grant.
As Senior Partner at Weil, he served as a strategic adviser to the firm’s roster of prominent global clients on a wide range of issues related to mergers & acquisitions, restructuring, and litigation. He also advised on corporate governance issues involving the responsibilities of corporate directors in complex financial transactions and crisis management.
He was President of the Conference of Chief Justices, Chair of the board of the National Center for State Courts, Chair of the Section of Business Law of the American Bar Association (ABA), Chair of the ABA Special Commission on Evaluation of the Rules of Professional Conduct (Ethics 2000), Chair of the Committee on Corporate Laws of the ABA Section of Business Law, and President of the Delaware State Bar Association.
During 1992-93, Chief Justice Veasey was the editor of Volume 48 of The Business Lawyer, the scholarly legal journal published by the Section of Business Law of the ABA. He is co-author, with Weil’s Christine Di Guglielmo, of a book, published by Oxford University Press, on the challenges of modern-day corporate general counsel. The book is entitled, E. Norman Veasey & Christine T. Di Guglielmo, Indispensable Counsel: The Chief Legal Officer in the New Reality (2012). The Wall Street Journal called it “a field manual to aid [chief legal officers] with their new tasks.” (March 9, 2012)
He is a Fellow of the American College of Trial Lawyers (a member of the Alternative Dispute Resolution Committee); a Fellow and honorary founding Chair of the American College of Governance Counsel; included in Best Lawyers in America; a director of the Institute for Law and Economics at the University of Pennsylvania; a member of the American Law Institute; a member of the International Advisory Board of the Centre for Corporate Law and Securities Regulation; a frequent panelist and lecturer on the corporation law, corporate governance, ethics, and professionalism; and has been appointed as an Adviser to a project of the American Law Institute on principles of the law, compliance, enforcement, and risk management for corporations, nonprofits, and other organizations.
He has served as an Adjunct Professor at the University of Pennsylvania Law School, where he taught a course entitled, “The Real World of Ethical Corporate Lawyering,” a subject on which he has lectured at other law schools, including Cornell Law School. He also served in previous years as an Adjunct Professor teaching this course at New York University School of Law, the University of Virginia School of Law, Wake Forest University School of Law, Dedman School of Law of Southern Methodist University, and the Moritz School of Law of Ohio State University. He is a lecturer on corporate governance at the Tuck School of Business of Dartmouth College, and appears often as a writer and speaker on various topics including alternate dispute resolution, corporate governance, and professional responsibility.
He is a graduate of Dartmouth College (A.B. 1954) and the University of Pennsylvania Law School (LLB 1957). He has been awarded honorary degrees of Doctor of Laws from the University of Delaware and Widener University.
