August J Matteis, Jr.

Bios

August J Matteis, Jr.

Augie Matteis, the Chairman of Weisbrod Matteis & Copley, is a trial lawyer who litigates high stakes cases across the country. Augie’s cases have been featured in major news and media outlets, such as The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Fox News, ABC News, The Washington Times, and USA Today. He has been interviewed on broad-ranging topics, including hurricane property damage, whistleblowers, recovering Nazi-stolen art, and collecting judgments against international companies.

Augie is lead trial counsel for the whistleblowers in U.S. ex rel. Rigsby v. State Farm, 1:06-cv-00433, which was the first case in history in which a jury found that one of FEMA’s insurance companies intentionally defrauded the federal government. The case was appealed all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court and was affirmed 8-0 in favor of the whistleblowing Rigsby sisters.
Augie is lead counsel for the Attorney General of Mississippi in a series of lawsuits brought against insurance companies for committing systematic fraud and other illegal acts in the claims handling process after Hurricane Katrina that resulted in Mississippi paying hundreds of millions of dollars to homeowners that should have been paid by the insurance companies.
Augie was lead trial counsel in In re Outsidewall Tire Litigation, 09-cv-1217, a case in which he represented a U.S. inventor against two tire conglomerates in China and Dubai. In this case, the foreign tire companies stole the inventor’s intellectual property and business plans related to specialized underground mining tires. Just eight months after meeting the plaintiff, Augie and his team obtained a $26 million jury verdict against the two companies in the Eastern District of Virginia for copyright and trademark infringement, conversion and civil conspiracy. The verdict was the largest verdict of any kind in Virginia in 2010 and one of the top 100 verdicts in the country. After the defendants refused to pay, WMC pursued the defendants in enforcement actions around the world and collected over $23 million of the judgment.
Augie represented a Holocaust survivor in a federal lawsuit brought against the Republic of Germany for refusing to return artwork stolen by Hitler’s art dealer and hidden away by his son, Cornelius Gurlitt, for over 70 years. As a result of WMC’s aggressive representation, WMC’s client was the first to recover artwork from Gurlitt’s stash.
Augie led WMC’s team that represented over 1,100 homeowners and business owners in FEMA’s Hurricane Sandy claims review process. After FEMA’s insurance companies were caught committing fraud and underpaying policyholders after Sandy, FEMA agreed to allow all policyholders to reopen their claims. WMC’s clients recovered an average of nearly four times what others received through the same review process.

Before beginning his legal career at a large, New York-based law firm, Augie lived in rural Connecticut and spent many summers working with his father, who was a master carpenter. His parents taught him to take pride in his work and not be intimidated by people just because they had more money or power. Those simple lessons have guided him throughout his life.

(202) 499-7910
amatteis@wmclaw.com
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Education

L.L.M., Georgetown University, Labor and Employment, Chetwood Prize (highest average in graduating class) (2002)
J.D., Georgetown University, magna cum laude, Order of the Coif, John M. Olin Fellowship in Law & Economics (1993)
B.A., Yale University, cum laude (1989)

Bar Memberships

Connecticut
District of Columbia

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