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Last month, D&O insurance lawyer John McCarrick and D&O insurance executive Paul Schiavone published a guest post on Kevin LaCroix’s blog, The D&O Diary, titled “Is it Time to Revisit the Scope of D&O Coverage?” John and Kevin’s post has triggered response posts from four policyholder advocates: Kevin of RT ProExec (response…

D&O Discourse is a forum for discussion of key issues in securities and governance litigation, to help improve litigation outcomes for public companies and their directors and officers, and D&O insurers and brokers, in specific cases and overall.

This post discusses a fundamental, structural, and deepening problem with securities class action defense: the lack of…

Hi, everyone:

When I moved to BakerHostetler to lead its firmwide Securities and Governance Litigation Team, I decided to take a break from publishing D&O Discourse — the blog I started in 2012 to provide in-depth opinion on key issues of law and practice in the world of securities and corporate governance litigation.  That…

I am grateful for the enthusiastic feedback I’ve received on my three-part blog post “Who is Winning the Securities Class Action War—Plaintiffs or Defendants?”  I especially appreciate the time Kevin LaCroix took to write a post addressing my post in his leading blog, The D&O Diary.

With the benefit of 25 years’ experience…

This is the third of a three-part post that analyzes why plaintiffs are winning the securities class action war and what defendants can do about it.

At stake is a system of securities litigation that sets up one side or the other to win more cases in the long term.  It has real-world consequences for…

This is the second of a three-part post evaluating who is winning the securities class action war.

Part I explained that this war is not just a scorecard of wins and losses, but rather a fight for strategic positioning—about achieving a system of securities litigation that sets up plaintiffs or defendants to win more cases…

The securities class action war is about far more than the height of the pleading hurdles plaintiffs must clear, the scorecard of motions to dismiss won and lost, or median settlement amounts.  It is a fight for strategic positioning—about achieving a system of securities litigation that sets up one side or the other to win…

By Doug Greene, Genevieve York-Erwin, Michael Tomasulo

I. Introduction

Small, development stage biotech companies are widely considered to be attractive targets for securities actions given the inherent risks of the industry and the volatility of their stock prices.  As a result, many of these companies have relatively limited D&O insurance options.  But are…

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…

The history of securities and corporate governance litigation is full of wishes about the law that we later regret (or will), or are happy were not granted.  Many of these are not obvious—and some will surprise people.  From certain case-by-case tactical decisions such as establishment of special litigation committees, to the (failed) attempt to abolish…