Biography
Benjamin Daniels is a member of the firm’s Business Litigation Group, with a focus on complex litigation and education law. He assists Fortune 100 companies, sovereign nations, and institutions of higher education in navigating complex legal and regulatory disputes.
Domestic and International Business Disputes
Ben works with businesses on all aspects of a case, from pre-litigation strategy through appeal. He has experience at every level of litigation, serving as lead and co-lead counsel on trials, appeals, internal investigations, and risk management reviews.
Clients turn to Ben to handle bet-the-company litigation in both domestic and international forums. He has defended multi-national patent disputes, prosecuted international arbitration for a major U.S. aerospace manufacturer, and defended financial institutions in interrelated merger litigations and governmental investigations.
Ben’s experience in cross-border litigation includes international arbitration, international discovery, domestic discovery in support of foreign litigation, and issues of sovereign immunity and derivative sovereign immunity. Among other things, he has helped U.S. companies defend against foreign discovery actions and assisted them in collecting information in foreign countries. He also has represented the former prime minister of a foreign sovereign in U.S. federal court, and successfully represented a sovereign nation in the U.S. Supreme Court.
No matter the context—counseling, litigation, cross-border counseling, or government investigations—Ben combines deep knowledge of legal and regulatory issues with a focus on each individual client’s unique business needs.
Higher Education
For more than 10 years, Ben has worked with universities, colleges, independent schools, education associations, and education companies to solve diverse legal and regulatory challenges. Among other things, he has helped major colleges and universities respond to federal and state investigations over Title IX, ADA compliance, FERPA, and state authorization. He also has assisted those institutions with a wide array of litigation, including cases involving sexual harassment, defamation, and class action allegations.
Ben’s recent experience includes successful resolution of several federal investigations, successful defense of a major university in the Connecticut Supreme Court, and trial-level work defending a tuition-refund class action. He brings extensive knowledge pertinent to education sector clients, along with an understanding of the unique regulatory and academic challenges facing institutions of higher education.
Community Involvement
Ben devotes significant time to pro bono matters at the trial and appellate levels. He is the former head of the Appellate Litigation Project at Yale Law School, where he supervised students representing indigent clients in the U.S. Courts of Appeals for the Second and Third Circuits. He also has received pro bono achievement awards from both of his former firms, and New York Legal Services, which honored him for his work successfully defending a criminal appeal in the New York appellate courts.
Before Robinson and Cole, Ben worked for another major Connecticut firm, focusing on complex litigation and higher education. He also worked for a global law firm in New York City, focusing on complex litigation and government enforcement actions including litigation involving the financial crisis.
His experience also includes federal clerkships at both the trial and appellate levels. He clerked for Judge John M. Rogers of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit, and Chief Judge Irma E. Gonzalez of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of California.