Jonathan Cuneo

Subsequent to his tenure at the FTC, Cuneo served as assistant counsel and then counsel to the Subcommittee on Monopolies and Commercial Law of the United States House Committee on the Judiciary. There, Cuneo counseled Congressman and Committee Chairman Peter W. Rodino regarding many antitrust issues. He also assisted in the Committee's consideration of potential budget-balancing amendments to the United States Constitution in 1982. He conducted a large-scale committee investigation and successfully advocated for oversight of the insurance industry.[4]

Since 1986, Cuneo has served as General Counsel and Legislative Representative to the Committee to Support Antitrust Laws ("COSAL"). He also co-founded the National Association of Securities and Commercial Law Attorneys ("NASCAT") [5] in 1988, and served as its general counsel from 1988 until 2004.

Cuneo served as Washington counsel in the first case to challenge the Joe Camel cigarette advertising campaign. The action was filed in California state court in 1991 well before the U.S. Attorney General began tobacco litigation. This litigation led to the release of documents that revealed R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company had studied under-aged smokers with a view toward selling cigarettes and consequently induced youths to start smoking through targeted advertising.[6] Congressman Henry Waxman called Cuneo and his colleagues "American Heroes" for their release of these documents.[7]

Cuneo served as Washington counsel on behalf of defrauded investors in Enron from 2002 through 2008. This Enron Securities Litigation recovered over $7 billion, the largest in the history of federal securities litigation.[8]

Cuneo's firm, Cuneo Gilbert & LaDuca, LLP, successfully represented Hungarian Holocaust Survivors seeking restitution and an accounting against the United States government in the Hungarian Gold Train case,[9] which was settled for $25.5 million in 2005 after nearly five years of litigation.[10] The settlement's terms also included an apology from the Bush Administration for the conduct of the U.S. Army.

In one of the largest product defect recoveries in recent history, Cuneo and his partner Charles LaDuca served as lead counsel in a bi-national settlement that provided $340 million to homeowners for the defective radiant heating hose known as Entran II.[11]

Cuneo's firm brought a path-breaking class action suit against Metromail for privacy violations surrounding supermarket questionnaires. After a woman in Ohio received a sexually suggestive letter from a maximum security inmate in Texas, it came to light that the company had subcontracted for Texas prisoners to "key" the questionnaire information.[12] Cuneo's firm settled the case for significant injunctive relief, and a cash pool of $15 million was made available to victims.

Cuneo's firm represented individual claimants against Prudential Insurance Company in post-settlement proceedings after a class action charging that Prudential had abused policyholders through deceptive sales practices. Over a period of eighteen months, his firm oversaw approximately 55,000 arbitration-like proceeding in this $4 billion settlement.[13]

Working for the plaintiff's securities bar, Cuneo was the lead lobbyist opposing passage of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act in 1995. Although the coalition Cuneo led was unsuccessful in preventing passage of the bill, some of its more extreme provisions were defeated as the Supreme Court recently recognized in Amgen v. Connecticut Retirement Plans and Trust Funds, (February 26, 2013).[14] After President Bill Clinton vetoed the bill in December 1995, Congress overruled that veto, the only veto override of the Clinton Presidency.[15]

Cuneo has authored numerous pieces in newspapers and professional journals, including The New York Times, Yale Human Rights & Development Law Journal, Georgetown Law Journal, The George Washington Law Review, The Nation,[1] and the Legal Times.[16] He is the co-editor of The International Handbook on Private Enforcement of Competition Law,[17] published in the U.S. in January 2011.