Megan W. Benett

Megan Wolfe Benett has been appointed to the Plaintiffs’ Executive Committee for the Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 Boeing 737 MAX investigation, discovery and litigation against Boeing and other defendants against Boeing and other defendants. Megan is a trial and appellate lawyer representing plaintiffs in aviation litigation, complex product liability cases, mass torts, maritime claims and 42 U.S.C. § 1983 cases against state and local government entities in federal and state courts. She has also been appointed by the judges of the Southern District of New York to serve on the court’s Criminal Justice Act (CJA) Panel through which she represents indigent individuals charged with having committed federal criminal offenses. 

At Kreindler, Megan currently leads our clients’ 9/11 litigation effort, including the international litigation against the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. She has represented, among others, victims of the Mumbai terror attacks, individuals and businesses harmed by the BP Deepwater Horizon oil disaster and families of the passengers killed in the crash of Colgan Flight 3407.

After graduating from Stanford University, Megan worked in Washington, DC at a national political party committee, on a Senate campaign and at a lobbying firm. Following her graduation from the University of Michigan Law School, Ms. Benett was the Albert M. Sacks Fellow at the Harvard Law School Criminal Justice Institute. For one year Megan served as staff counsel at the Claims Resolution Tribunal in Zürich, Switzerland where she adjudicated claims to dormant Swiss bank accounts that had been owned by victims of Nazi persecution. 

Upon her return to the United States, Megan was a clerk to the Honorable Judith S. Kaye, Chief Judge of the New York State Court of Appeals and, prior to that, a public defender in Manhattan at the Legal Aid Society. 

Megan has argued cases to the United States Courts of Appeals for the Second and Ninth Circuits and the First and Second Departments in New York State and has tried cases and argued substantive motions in a number of district courts in the Southern and Eastern Districts of New York, as well as in numerous New York State courts.