As I have noted in prior posts (most recently here), a recurring type of pandemic-related securities suit involves companies whose fortunes prospered at the outset of the pandemic but whose performance sagged as the coronavirus outbreak evolved. The latest lawsuit of this type is the securities suit filed earlier this week against the retailer Target Corp., in which the plaintiffs allege that the surge in consumer demand at the outset of the pandemic led the company to overstock inventory, causing an inventory overhang that later undercut the company’s financial performance. A copy of the March 29, 2023, complaint against Target can be found here.

Continue Reading Target Hit with Securities Suit Over Pandemic-Related Inventory Overhang

Greg Markel
Sarah Fedner

In the following guest post, Greg Markel and Sarah Fedner take a look at the characteristics of securities class action lawsuits that made securities suit mediations different from mediations in other types of litigated matters, as well as the practical implications of those differences. Markel is Securities Litigation co-Chair and Partner at Seyfarth Shaw LLP and Fedner is a Senior Managing Associate at Seyfarth Shaw LLP. A version of this article previously was published in the New York Law Journal. I would like to thank Greg and Sarah for allowing me to publish their article as a guest post on this site. I welcome guest post submissions from responsible authors on topics of interest to this blog’s readers. Please contact me directly if you would like to submit a guest post. Here is Greg and Sarah’s article.

Continue Reading Guest Post: Why are Securities Class Action Mediations Different from Other Mediations?

Even though the COVID-19 pandemic is now into its fourth year, plaintiffs’ lawyers continue to file pandemic-related securities class action lawsuits, increasingly in conjunction with allegations involving other macroeconomic factors, such as rising interest rates, economic inflation, supply chain disruption, and labor supply shortages. In the latest example of litigation of this type, last week plaintiffs’ lawyers filed a securities class action lawsuit against tool maker Stanley Black & Decker, alleging that the company misled investors that the pandemic-fueled surge in demand for the company’s product would continue even as conditions changed. A copy of the March 24, 2023, complaint against the company can be found here.

Continue Reading Stanley Black & Decker Hit with COVID-Related Securities Suit

For several years now, one of the perennial questions in the corporate and securities arena has been the extent to which cybersecurity-related issues will contribute to D&O claims. There has never really been the volume of securities and derivative lawsuits that some observers expected, but there has been a small scattering of occasional suits filed from time to time. Now, in what is the latest cybersecurity-related D&O suit, a plaintiff shareholder has filed securities class action lawsuit against pay-TV services provider, Dish Networks, related to a network service disruption at the company caused by a cyber-security incident. A copy of the March 23, 2023, complaint can be found here.

Continue Reading Dish Networks Hit with Cybersecurity-Related Securities Suit

In a recent short opinion, the Ninth Circuit held that the California statute precluding insurance coverage for loss caused by a willful act bars coverage for the underlying malicious prosecution claim even though the claim settled and there was no adjudication that the alleged willful act took place. For reasons set out below, I believe the court’s interpretation of the statute –-even though apparently well-grounded in established authority — goes beyond the statute’s purpose and plain language and produces a result that undermines the very purposes of the insurance policy. The Ninth Circuit’s March 15, 2023, opinion can be found here. A March 22, 2023 post on the Wiley Law Firm’s Executive Summary Blog about the decision can be found here.

Continue Reading Adjudication Not Required for California’s Statutory Willful Act Coverage Preclusion

The collapse of Silicon Valley Bank is one of those singular events, charged with implications and fraught with dangerous possibilities, but that is also still so recent that it is difficult to discern what it ultimately will mean. Earlier this week, in an excellent webinar presented by the Rock Center for Corporate Governance at the Stanford Law School and entitled “Silicon Valley Brawl: Litigation, Accounting, and Regulatory Implications of SVB’s Collapse,” Stanford Law Professors Joseph Grundfest and Colleen Honigsberg and University of California Berkeley Law Professor Robert Bartlett took a detailed look at the causes and potential consequences SVB’s failure. This presentation, a video recording of which may be found here, is excellent, and the accompanying slides, which may be found here, make for indispensable reading for anyone who wants to try to understand what happened at SVB and what it might mean from a legal, financial, and regulatory standpoint. My thanks to the Rock Center and Stanford Law School for permission to link here to the webinar recording and to the slides.

Delaware’s courts traditionally have said that breach of the duty of oversight claims (sometimes referred to as Caremark claims) are “possibly the most difficult theory in corporation law upon which a plaintiff might hope to win a judgment.” However, in series of cases following the Delaware Supreme Court’s 2019 decision in Marchand v. Barnhill, Delaware courts have sustained a number of breach of the duty of oversight claims. More recently, Vice Chancellor Laster, in a pair of decisions in the McDonald’s case, elaborated significantly on the reach of duty of oversight. Among other things, Laster made it clear that the duty extends to corporate officers as well as to directors. Some commentators (including me) were concerned that Laster’s elaborations could lead to further lawsuits alleging breach of the duty of oversight.

Now, in what is the first high-profile post-McDonald’s Caremark claim of which I am aware, a group of four institutional investors has brought a breach of the duty of oversight claim against certain directors and officers of Meta, alleging that the executives failed to take sufficient action with respect to allegations that the company’s social media sites were being used for human trafficking. The new complaint appears to have been shaped to reflect many of the implications arising from Laster’s decisions in the McDonald’s case. A copy of the redacted public version of the plaintiffs’ March 20, 2023, complaint in the Meta case can be found here.

Continue Reading Meta Board and Execs Hit with Oversight Duty Breach Claim Based on Trafficking Allegations
Planet Earth

Many readers may have seen that earlier this week, President Biden made his first use of his Presidential veto powers to block a Congressional measure that would have reinstated Trump-era Labor Department ban on retirement plans considering factors such as climate change, social impacts or pending lawsuits when making investment choices. However, readers may not have seen that last week, in apparent anticipation of the Presidential veto, a group of governors of 19 states announced that they had formed an alliance, led by Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, to “push back against President Biden’s environmental, social, and corporate governance agenda that is destabilizing the American economy and the global financial system.”

The 19 state governors issued a joint statement that further explained their reasoning for forming the alliance. The March 16, 2023, press release from Governor DeSantis’s office about the alliance can be found here. The March 16, 2023, joint statement of the governors can be found here. A March 21, 2023 memo from the Cadwalader law firm about the governors’ alliance can be found here. The details of the Department of Labor guidelines, the Congressional measure, and President Biden’s veto are discussed in a March 20, 2023 post on The Nickel Blog, here.

Continue Reading Governors Form Alliance to Fight ESG

At the beginning of the year, when I surveyed the D&O claims landscape and predicted the factors that I thought might drive D&O claims volume in 2023, one set of factors I projected might make significant contributions to the number of claims to be filed during the year were the number of macroeconomic challenges – for example, rising interest rates, economic inflation, labor supply disruption, and the war in Ukraine. The recent failure of Silicon Valley Bank and the ensuing securities litigation provides one illustration of how these macro factors can translate into D&O claims.

Now, in the latest illustration of these forces at work, investors have filed a securities lawsuit against the organic foods company United Natural Foods, following the company’s recent disappointing earnings announcement in which the company disclosed a decline in profitability, despite increasing sales, due to inflationary pressures. A copy of the March 20, 2023, lawsuit against United Natural Foods can be found here.

Continue Reading Inflation Hits Organic Food Company’s Quarterly Results, Draws Securities Suit

The opioid crisis in the United States is not a new development; sadly, it has been around for years, as has D&O litigation relating to the crisis. Indeed, more than five years ago, I published a post in which I noted the outbreak at the time of a number of opioid-related securities suits. Now, in the latest of these opioid-related securities suits to be filed, and in the wake of the U.S. Department of Justice’s filings of a complaint in intervention in an opioid-related False Claims action against the company, a securities class action lawsuit has now been filed against the pharmacy company, Rite Aid Corporation. The March 20, 2023, Rite Aid complaint can be found here.

Continue Reading Rite Aid Hit with Opioid-Related Securities Suit