John Rue has been representing parents of children with disabilities in disputes with their schools over the provision of special education services for over a decade. He leverages his background as a sophisticated civil litigator, having begun his career at White & Case LLP defending nationwide class actions for multinational corporations, to bring the maximum pressure to bear on school districts to reach a settlement that his clients can accept. But when settlement discussions stall, John bears down hard on all fronts, both conventional and unconventional.

John serves as General Counsel for the Innisfree Foundation, a 501(c)(3) non-profit that assists parents of children with disabilities to advocate for the education rights of their children and represents Innisfree (as well as other clients) in dozens of OPRA disputes.

Cases as to which John is particularly proud of the result include:

• An administrative decision (not appealed by the district) in which we successfully argued that the stay-put protects the current placement even if fifteen days elapsed after the proposal of a new IEP before filing, so long as the placement did not change during that time.

• A federal decision on appeal from denial of emergent relief in the OAL, that resulted in a global settlement, ordering a school district to provide a “substantively equivalent service” during pendency of the stay-put to a student as to whom the district had altered ABA home services by replacing a highly qualified teacher with a “behavior technician” without any comparable qualifications.

• An administrative decision authored by the then-Acting Chief Judge of the OAL, holding that if a school district fails to respond to a request for an independent education evaluation within twenty days, it is automatically liable for the cost of providing the evaluation.

John came to special education practice through personal experience. Early in John’s career as an attorney (still a junior litigator at White & Case), John decided to become the terrifying combination of a blue-chip New York litigator who knows New Jersey special education law inside and out. (To his knowledge, he is the only one – but he’s interested in meeting others if any exist.) From that time forward at White & Case, he focused all of his (voluminous) pro bono practice on New Jersey special education litigation. And when he started his own firm (originally called The Law Offices of John D. Rue), education law became the cornerstone in the firm’s foundation.

In his spare time, he enjoys poker, chess, and riding his BMW R1200C motorcycle.

Publications

Note, Returning to the Roots of the Bramble Bush: The “But For” Test Regains Primacy in Causal Analysis in the American Law Institute’s Proposed Restatement (Third) of Torts, 71 Fordham L. Rev. 2679 (2003)
Early Reflections on e-Discovery in Antitrust Litigation: Ten Months into the New Regime, Antitrust Magazine, Vol. 22, No. 1 (Fall 2007) (with Jack E. Pace III) October 15, 2007
E-discovery ‘Worst Practices’: Ten Sure-Fire Ways to Mismanage a Litigation Hold, 13 N.Y. Bus. L.J. 2, 48 (Fall 2009) (with Jack E. Pace III)
Special Education Mediation not Always the Best Option, Times of Trenton (with Gerard Uzzi) March 21, 2010
E-discovery “Worst Practices:” Ten Sure-Fire Ways to Mismanage Document Review and Production, 14 N.Y. Bus. L.J. 2, 62 (Winter 2010) (with Jack E. Pace III and Jason A. Bartlett) December 15, 2010
Well, I Sure Don’t “Like” That! Litigation Holds, Social Media, and Employees’ Online Data, 20 Pretrial Practice & Discovery 1 (Fall 2011) (with Patricia Eastwood, Caterpillar Financial Services)2011

Public Speaking / Teaching

International discovery: EU, U.S. and Latin America privacy and discovery update, Strategies for Spanning the E-Discovery Divide, Masters’ Series for Legal Professionals (Houston), Aug. 2011
Moderator, Attorney Client Privilege and ESI: How to Maintain Privilege “In the Cloud,” Complex Litigation and Practitioners’ Update, ALI-ABA Third Electronic Discovery and Digital Evidence Practitioners’ Workshop, 2011
Moderator, In-House Counsel Colloquy on the Allocation of E-Discovery Resources, ABA National Institute on E-Discovery, 2012
Hot Topics in Special Education Law, NJ Institute of Continuing Legal Education, 2012 & 2015