Hugh D. Sandler

Hugh Sandler has over fifteen years of experience litigating civil actions at both the trial and appellate levels. He has represented clients in actions principally under the Sherman Act, the Anti-Terrorism Act, RICO, the TVPRA, the Commodity Exchange Act, the Bank Secrecy Act, constitutional law, anti-money laundering regulations, as well as breach of contract and negligence. Hugh has also represented clients in DOJ, SEC, FBI, FINRA, FinCEN, and OCC investigations.

Hugh’s representative matters include serving as both plaintiff and defense counsel. He has, for example, represented plaintiffs, on a class-wide basis, in various financial sector price-fixing cases and individual plaintiffs in labor trafficking, Title VII, and RICO cases. He has also defended Fortune 500 companies in anti-terrorism, consumer protection, and breach of contract cases. And he has served as defense counsel to individuals under DOJ indictment for alleged fraud and financial wrongdoing.

Hugh’s trial work includes representing plaintiffs in a five-week federal human trafficking, Civil Rights Act, and RICO jury trial. The case, David v. Signal Int’l., LLC, achieved the largest jury award for labor trafficking in U.S. history and was recognized by the U.S. State Department in its 2015 Trafficking in Persons Report. For this trial, Hugh was chosen (along with his trial co-counsel) to receive Public Justice’s 2015 Trial Lawyer of the Year award, which is an annual award issued by Public Justice to the legal team who litigated the leading precedent-setting and socially significant case to verdict or settlement in that year.  

Hugh has also briefed and argued appellate cases including before the Second Circuit, where he represented an appellant in Turkmen v. Ashcroft, a constitutional law case related to the landmark Iqbal litigation.

Hugh is a member of The Federal Bar Council’s Inn of Court, where he serves on the Second Circuit Courts Committee. He is a faculty member of the Federal Bar Council’s “Access to Justice” program, which trains young attorneys on core litigation and trial skills. Hugh is also a sessional instructor at the University of Waterloo teaching a fourth-year seminar course on federal civil practice in the university’s Sociology and Legal Studies Department. Hugh has been recognized as a “Super Lawyer” by Thomson Reuters’s Super Lawyers publication every year since 2014.

Hugh graduated from the University of Waterloo in 2003, with a Joint Honors degree in Economics and Political Science. In 2007, he graduated with Great Distinction from the Faculty of Law at McGill University. Following law school, Hugh clerked for the Honorable Judge Arthur Gans of the Ontario Superior Court of Justice in Toronto. Hugh is proficient in French and holds dual U.S. and Canadian citizenship.