Discussion of Key Issues in Securities & Governance Litigation
I started the D&O Discourse blog in October 2012 to generate discussion among the repeat players in securities and corporate governance litigation: insurers, brokers, mediators, economists, plaintiffs’ counsel, and defense counsel. While I share opinions from a defense-counsel perspective, I call it like I see it.
Here are five of my favorite posts – well…
In 2012, I started the D&O Discourse blog to have a discussion among the repeat players in securities and corporate governance litigation: insurers, brokers, mediators, economists, plaintiffs’ counsel, and defense counsel. I share opinions from the defense-counsel perspective, but I call it like I see it. For example, in a post in anticipation of the…
How will the 2017 arrival of Justice Neil Gorsuch influence the US Supreme Court’s securities-fraud jurisprudence?
My colleague Kristin Beneski and I discuss this question in a Washington Legal Foundation Working Paper titled “US Supreme Court Securities-Fraud Jurisprudence: An Emerging New Direction?”
In our Working Paper, we analyze whether Justice Gorsuch may urge…
The villain in the fight against securities class actions is the fraud-on-the-market presumption of reliance established by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1988 in Basic Inc. v. Levinson, 485 U.S. 224 (1988). Without Basic, the thinking goes, a plaintiff could not maintain a securities class action, and without securities class actions, executives could…
I am committed to helping shape a system for securities litigation defense that helps directors and officers get through securities litigation safely and efficiently, without losing their serenity or dignity, and without facing any real risk of paying any personal funds.
But we are actually moving in the opposite direction of this goal, and unless…
This year will be remembered as the year of the Super Bowl of securities litigation, Halliburton Co. v. Erica P. John Fund, Inc. (“Halliburton II”), 134 S. Ct. 2398 (2014), the case that finally gave the Supreme Court the opportunity to overrule the fraud-on-the-market presumption of reliance, established in 1988 in Basic v.
Even the most experienced securities defense attorneys regularly summarize Rule 10b-5(b) as creating a cause of action for “false or misleading statements and omissions of material fact.” Courts –including the Supreme Court – routinely use the same shorthand. When I was a new securities litigation defense attorney, one of the first things that I learned…
At long last, the United States Supreme Court is going to address the viability and/or prerequisites of the fraud-on-the-market presumption of reliance established by the Court in 1988 in Basic v. Levinson. Securities litigators, on both sides of the aisle, are understandably anxious, because our entire industry is about to change – either a…
In our post in the immediate wake of the Supreme Court’s decision in Amgen Inc. v. Connecticut Retirement Plans, we concluded that rather than being a new threat to the defense of securities class actions, Amgen basically endorsed the status quo: In holding that plaintiffs do not need to establish that allegedly false statements…
The Supreme Court released its anxiously awaited decision in Amgen Inc. v. Connecticut Retirement Plans yesterday. On the face of the decision, it was a loss for defendants in that case, and for companies everywhere that are forced to defend themselves against securities class action lawsuits – as the Court found that plaintiffs do not…