William H. Grae

William H. Grae is a partner at the New York and northern New Jersey office. He received a B.A. in medical anthropology from Cornell in 1991 and a J.D. from Pace Law School in 1994, graduating as a ranking scholar and Dean's List honoree. While at Pace, Mr. Grae divided his time between the John Jay Legal Services Health Law Clinic, funded through a Root-Tilden-Kern grant, and membership in the Pace Environmental Law Review, while also teaching part-time at several area high schools and an English-as-a-Second Language program in New York City's Chinatown. Mr. Grae's subsequent practice has focused on personal-injury liability defense. His broad range of trial and appellate experience in New York and New Jersey primarily has been on behalf of insurers and self-insured entities, principally involving construction-site accidents, commercial- and residential-premises liability, defense of interstate motor-carriers in catastrophic truck accidents, and litigation of related coverage issues, in State and federal courts throughout New York and New Jersey. In the field of mass torts, Mr. Grae also has significant experience with pharmaceutical, asbestos, lead, firearm and aviation-related risk management, investigation, and litigation. For more than a decade, he has also regularly defended financial entities in consumer-credit and related liability claims in State and federal courts. Mr. Grae's appellate experience includes preparation of briefs and argument before the Second Circuit Court of Appeals, New York State Court of Appeals and several departments of the New York Appellate Division. His active alternate-dispute resolution practice includes multi-party mediations and arbitrations before the American Arbitration Association, federal mediators and independant arbitrators. His coverage opinions have been relied upon both by insurers and reinsurers of catastrophic personal and property losses in the United States, Europe and Australia. On a pro bono basis, Mr. Grae has served as a Special Assistant District Attorney with the Appeals Bureau of the Office of the Kings County District Attorney in New York. In 2004, he was certified by the State of New Jersey as an Animal Cruelty Investigator and later was commissioned as a Humane Enforcement Officer with the Bergen County Prosecutor's Animal Cruelty Task Force/Bergen County Chapter of the New Jersey SPCA (Law Enforcement Division). Mr. Grae also sporadically serves as an arbitrator in the City of New York Small Claims Court. He has lectured on construction-accident liability under New York's Labor Law, professional malpractice risk management, and other litigation-related subjects.

• Partner
• Languages
• Russian
• Mandarin Chinese

• U.S. Court of Appeals 2nd Circuit, 1997
• New Jersey, 1995
• New York, 1995
• U.S. District Court Eastern District of New York, 1995
• U.S. District Court Southern District of New York, 1995
• U.S. District Court Western District of New York
• U.S. District Court District of New Jersey
• U.S. Court of Appeals 3rd Circuit

• Kings County, 1995 - 1996 (Special Assistant District Attorney)
• Pace University John Jay Legal Services, 1992 - 1993 (Board of Directors)
• The Association of the Bar of the City of New York (Member)
• New York State Bar Association (Member)
• American Bar Association (Member)