James A. O'Brien III

Graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in Economics from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst in 1984 and received his J.D. in 1988 from the New England Law School of Law. He was a symposium editor for the New England Law Review, and published a Comment, Removing the Client Perjury Skeleton From the Defense Counsel’s Closet, Nix v. Whiteside, 22 New Eng. L. Rev. 675 (1988). After receiving his J.D., Mr. O’Brien served as an attorney advisor with the U.S. Department of Labor, Office of Administrative Law Judges, in Washington, D.C., from 1988 to 1989. Subsequently, Mr. O’Brien was accepted into the Attorney General’s Honors Program of the U.S. Department of Justice. He served as a Special Assistant U.S. Attorney with civil division of the U.S. Attorney’s Office, Southern District of New York, from 1990 to 2001. In 2001, Mr. O’Brien joined the law firm of Seeger Weiss LLP in New York City, where his practice focused on complex litigation including false claims act cases, class actions, mass torts, and multidistrict litigation. Mr. O’Brien co-authored an article, Administrative Housekeeping and Ethical Matters in Mass Tort MDLs and Class Actions, published in the Sedona Conference Journal in 2012, and a chapter for MDL Standards and Best Practices published by the Duke Law Center for Judicial Studies in 2014. Mr. O’Brien’s current practice focuses primarily on class actions and multidistrict class action litigation. He is admitted to the bars of the States of New York and Massachusetts, the United States District Courts for the Southern and Eastern Districts of New York and the District of Massachusetts, the United States Supreme Court, and the United States Courts of Appeals for the Third, Eighth, and Seventh Circuits. Mr. O’Brien joined Carella, Byrne, Cecchi, Olstein, Brody & Agnello as of counsel in June 2017.