OUR TEAM
NOAH MESSING
Noah Messing is a founding partner of Messing & Spector LLP.
Noah is a member of the faculty at Yale Law School where he teaches courses about written advocacy, appellate advocacy, ADR, litigating civil lawsuits, and lobbying.
He previously worked with Yale’s Supreme Court Advocacy Clinic to prepare and strengthen the briefs and petitions filed by that clinic. Noah wrote The Art of Advocacy: Briefs, Motions and Writing Strategies of America’s Best Lawyers, which reviewers called
“a tour de force,” “absolutely essential,” “outstanding,” “accessible, yet sophisticated,” “fantastic,” and “unparalleled.” Since 2009, Noah has trained thousands of lawyers at top U.S. law firms to write and advocate more effectively for their clients. Since co-founding Messing & Spector in 2017, Noah has served as lead counsel in a nationwide class action about the Takings Clause and pensions, won multiple appeals for clients, and serves as counsel in a putative class action related to the property rights of New Yorkers.
Noah has served since 2013 as an arbitrator and mediator with the American Arbitration Association, for which he has had the privilege of resolving more than 150 commercial and consumer disputes.
Before joining Yale’s faculty, Noah served as Counsel to Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton and as Associate Counsel to the Hillary Clinton for President campaign. He also spent the better part of a decade working as a trial and appellate litigator in Washington D.C. at two top boutique firms, Boies, Schiller & Flexner LLP and Robbins Russell Englert Orseck & Untereiner LLP.
Noah graduated in 2000 from Yale Law School, where he was a Coker Fellow and an editor on The Yale Law Journal. He received both the Benjamin Cardozo Prize and the Potter Stewart Prize in the Morris Tyler Moot Court of Appeals program; those prizes are awarded, respectively, for the year’s best brief and to the team that wins the Spring semester moot court competition. He graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Emory University.
Noah is admitted to practice in New York.*
*Not admitted to practice in Connecticut.
PHIL SPECTOR
Phil Spector is a founding partner of Messing & Spector LLP.
Before launching the firm, he held positions at an elite litigation boutique and in all three branches of the federal government. He served as the Senior Advisor to the Legal Adviser at the U.S. Department of State, where he counseled the Legal Adviser and worked closely with colleagues at the State
Department and across the U.S. government on legal matters involving the national security and foreign policy of the United States.
At his law firm, Phil was counsel of record in a federal appeal in the Ninth Circuit that resulted in arguably the broadest decision in favor of whistleblower's in U.S. history. He represented a nationwide class in a federal lawsuit about the Takings Clause, represented municipalities in California against Netflix and Hulu, and currently serves as counsel in a putative class action about whether New York City violates the Takings Clause when it forces blameless neighbors to have their properties occupied by sheds that belong to the plaintiffs' neighbors.
Before launching Messing & Spector LLP, Phil was Senior Counsel to U.S. Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, where he advised her on a range of legal and policy topics, including questions of constitutional law, national security, criminal law, civil rights, immigration, tort reform and labor policy. He also served as a legal fellow for U.S. Senator Jon O. Corzine, working on criminal justice issues and Supreme Court nominations.
Phil practiced law at Boies, Schiller & Flexner LLP, where he specialized in antitrust and litigation matters. He clerked for the Honorable Jon O. Newman of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, and the Honorable John D. Bates of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. Phil previously served as a Visiting Clinical Lecturer in Law at Yale Law School, where he taught in the Rule of Law Clinic. He has served as an adjunct professor of international law at Johns Hopkins University, and has lectured to law school and college students on cyber and national security law issues.
He has served as a member of the International Group of Experts for the NATO Cooperative Cyber Defence Centre of Excellence’s Tallinn Manual on the International Law Applicable to Cyber Conflict. In addition to his legal and government experience, Phil was a Vice President for Strategic Initiatives at Johns Hopkins University, where he led the planning and implementation of major policy issues across the university.
Phil graduated in 2000 from Yale Law School, where he was an Articles Editor on The Yale Law Journal. He was the winner of the Thomas I. Emerson Prize for Best Paper on a Topic Relating to Legislation, and a finalist for the Benjamin Cardozo Prize for best brief in the Morris Tyler Moot Court of Appeals program. He graduated from Swarthmore College.
Phil is admitted to practice in Maryland and Washington D.C.