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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.

Monday’s oral argument before the Supreme Court in Laborers District Counsel Construction Industry Pension Fund v. Omnicare, Inc. (“Omnicare”) was remarkable in that, as Omnicare attorney Kannon Shanmugam noted, it was the “rare case in which none of the parties is defending the reasoning of the court of appeals below.”

As we explained in last…

Yesterday’s Supreme Court decision in Halliburton Co. v. Erica P. John Fund, Inc. (Halliburton II) may well have the lowest impact-to-fanfare ratio of any Supreme Court securities decision.  Despite the social-media-fueled frenzy within the securities bar leading up to the decision, the Court’s decision will effect little change in class certification law and practice…

My partner Claire Loebs Davis and I are honored to be working with Washington Legal Foundation on a U.S. Supreme Court amicus brief in the Omnicare securities class action.  Omnicare concerns what makes a statement of opinion false.

As many of our readers know, Claire and I feel that improvement in the law on statements…

In 1995, public companies and their directors and officers received one of the greatest statutory gifts in the history of American corporate law:  the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act.  The Reform Act established heightened standards for pleading falsity and scienter, among other protections, to allow for dismissal before discovery in a fair percentage of cases. …

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 …

When is an opinion a false or misleading statement?  If a company official says “I think the deal is fair,” is it a false statement just because the deal is objectively unfair?  Or only if the official also did not subjectively believe the deal was fair when he voiced that opinion?

With the Sixth Circuit’s…

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…