Stephen Brown-Okruhlik

First Year of Call
Ontario, 2014

Areas of Practice
Corporate Commercial Litigation

Description
Stephen Brown-Okruhlik is an experienced and effective commercial litigator. His practice is focused on corporate stakeholder disputes, securities litigation and insolvency. He represents businesses, investment funds, banks, shareholders and other corporate stakeholders in high-stakes litigation. He also regularly provides advice to clients in connection with contentious corporate M&A matters and financing transactions.

Stephen has extensive experience with M&A litigation, proxy contests, creditors’ remedies, complex debt instruments, derivatives, corporate fraud, oppression, contested transactions, secondary market securities class actions, international arbitrations and cross-border insolvencies. He has acted for various stakeholders in many of Canada’s recent significant cross-border insolvencies. He has acted for business and non-profit corporations in high-profile contests for board control. Stephen appeared before the Ontario Securities Commission in Re Aurora Cannabis, the seminal Canadian case about shareholder rights plans (poison pills).

Stephen is active in the commercial litigation and insolvency bar. He is a Co-Chair of the American Bar Association’s M&A Litigation Subcommittee (Commercial & Business Litigation Committee). He is a former executive member of the Ontario Bar Association’s Insolvency Section. Stephen writes and speaks frequently to Canadian and international audiences, including about ‘busted deal’ disputes and ‘creditor violence’ trends.