Litigation Reforms

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In the world of securities and corporate governance litigation, we are always in the middle of a reform discussion of some variety.  For the past several years, there has been great focus on amendment of corporate bylaws to corral and curtail shareholder corporate-governance claims, principally shareholder challenges to mergers.*  Meritless merger litigation is indeed a…

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…

As I have previously written, the Sixth Circuit’s erroneous interpretation of the scienter component of the Supreme Court’s decision in Matrixx Initiatives, Inc. v. Siracusano, 131 S. Ct. 1309 (2011), is one of the biggest threats to the protections of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act. 

The resulting flawed analysis – which I …

On April 16, 2013, Law360 featured me in its Q&A series.

In the article, I address two critical economic issues in securities litigation defense: containing escalating defense costs, and managing electronic document review.  I also discuss the Supreme Court’s Amgen decision, a securities litigation defense lawyer who impressed me, a case that helped launch…

On April 4, 2013, in the Allergan decision, the Delaware Supreme Court reversed the Court of Chancery’s ruling last year that the dismissal of a shareholder derivative action in California did not preclude other stockholders from bringing the same corporate claim in Delaware.  The Delaware Supreme Court’s decision was based on a Constitutional Full Faith…

The recurring and pervasive problem of flawed confidential witness (“CW”) allegations tops my list of the key issues in securities class action litigation.*  I don’t mean just notorious situations such as those recently at issue in the Lockheed, SunTrust, and Boeing securities class actions – which I discussed in an earlier post and…

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…