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the matter. Mr. Greenberg is expected to attend, they added.

It will be an unusual homecoming of sorts for Mr. Greenberg, who ran A.I.G. for nearly four decades until resigning amid investigations into an accounting scandal in 2005. For some years after his abrupt departure, there was bitterness and litigation between the company and its former chief.

After the Starr briefing, lawyers for the Treasury Department and the Federal Reserve Bank of New York -- the architects of the bailout and defendants in the cases -- will make their presentations. Each side will have a few minutes to rebut.

While the discussions are part of an already scheduled board meeting, securities lawyers say it is rare for an entire board to meet on a single piece of litigation.

"It makes eminent good sense in this case, but I've never heard of this kind of situation," said Henry Hu, a former regulator who is now a professor at the University of Texas School of Law in Austin.

It is unclear whether the directors are leaning toward joining the case. The board said in a court filing that it would probably decide by the end of January.

Until now, the insurance giant has sat on the sidelines. But its delay in making a decision, some officials say, has drawn out the case, forcing the government to pay significant legal costs.

The presentations Wednesday come on top of hundreds of pages of submissions that the government prepared last year, a time- consuming and costly process. The Justice Department, which has assigned about a dozen lawyers to the case and has hired outside experts, told a judge handling the matter that Starr was seeking 16 million pages in documents from the government.

"How many?" a startled judge, Thomas C. Wheeler of the U.S. Court of Federal Claims, asked, according to a transcript.

The bailout of A.I.G., struck just days after the collapse of Lehman Brothers in September 2008, proved to be among the biggest and thorniest of the financial crisis rescues.

The company was on the brink of collapse because of deteriorating mortgage securities that it had insured through credit-default swaps.

Starting in 2010, the insurer embarked on a series of actions aimed at repaying its taxpayer-financed bailout, including selling major divisions. It also held a number of stock offerings for the U.S. government to reduce its stake, which eventually generated a profit of about $22 billion.

Overseeing that comeback was a new chief executive, Robert H. Benmosche, a tough-talking longtime insurance executive. Mr. Benmosche has won plaudits -- from government officials, among others -- for his managing of A.I.G.'s public relations while he helped nurse the company back to financial health.

But he and the rest of A.I.G.'s board must now confront an equally pugnacious predecessor in Mr. Greenberg.

In the case against the government, Mr. Greenberg, through his lead lawyer, David Boies, contends that the bailout plan extracted a "punitive" interest rate of more than 14 percent. The government's huge stake in the company also diluted the holdings of existing shareholders like Starr, which at the time was A.I.G.'s largest investor.

"The government has been saying, 'We're your friend, we owned and controlled you and we let you go.' But A.I.G. doesn't owe loyalty to the government," a person close to Mr. Greenberg said. "It owes loyalty to its shareholders."

The government, Starr argues, used billions of dollars from A.I.G. to settle credit-default swaps the insurer had with banks like Goldman Sachs. The deal, according to the lawsuit, empowered the government to carry out a "backdoor bailout" of Wall Street.

Starr argued that the actions violated the Fifth Amendment. "The government is not empowered to trample shareholder and property rights, even in the midst of a financial emergency," the Starr complaint says.

The Treasury Department declined to comment. A spokesman for the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, Jack Gutt, said, "There is no merit to these allegations." He noted that "A.I.G.'s board of directors had an alternative choice to borrowing from the Federal Reserve, and that choice was bankruptcy."

A U.S. District Court judge in New York agreed, dismissing the case in November. In an 89-page opinion, Judge Paul A. Engelmayer wrote that while Starr's complaint "paints a portrait of government treachery worthy of an Oliver Stone movie," the company "voluntarily accepted the hard terms offered by the one and only rescuer that stood between it and imminent bankruptcy."

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit recently agreed to review the case on an expedited timeline. The judge in the U.S. Court of Federal Claims in Washington, meanwhile, has declined to dismiss the case and continues to await A.I.G.'s decision.