Largely as a result of a flood of M&A related lawsuits, there were a significant number of new securities class action lawsuits filed in the first quarter of 2011, and even factoring out the M&A lawsuits, the first three months of the year still represented an active period for securities lawsuit filings.
Taking the
I am pleased to reproduce below a guest post from my friend Maurice Pesso, who is a parner in the White & Williams law firm, and his colleagues Sarah Katz Downey. I welcome guest contributions from responsible commentators. This article first appeared as a White & Williams law firm memo. Please note
In a unanimous March 22, 2011 opinion by Justice Sonia Sotomayor, the U.S. Supreme Court rejected the argument of Matrixx Initiatives that adverse product reports must be "statistically significant" in order for a manufacturer to have an obligation to disclose the reports to investors. As a result of the Court’s decision, shareholders claims against
I am pleased to reproduce below a guest post from my friend and colleague, David S. De Berry. Dave is an attorney and CEO of Concord Specialty Risk, a series of a Delaware limited liability companies owned by RSG Specialty Group, LLC. I want to emphasize that while Dave and I are now
Any list of the most important and influential Americans of the 20th century would have to include William Brennan, whose 34-year tenure as an associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court coincided with –and in many ways both reflected and influenced – a period of extraordinary change both in American society and in
It has been a long road — one that included among other things, an amicus brief filed at the U.S. Supreme Court in connection with Morrison v. National Australia Bank – but the defendants in the Infineon Technologies securities suit have managed to have the court dismiss the claims of company shareholders who purchased their
On March 7, 2011, in the latest development in a long-running securities suit that is among the few securities class action lawsuits to go to trial and that had previously resulted in a $277.5 verdict in plaintiffs’ favor, the U.S. Supreme Court denied Apollo Group’s petition for writ of certiorari. As a result, the
Though the average dollar value of securities class action settlements approved in 2010 declined slightly compared to 2009, the median settlement amount reached record levels, according to Cornerstone Research’s annual 2010 Securities Class Action Settlement Study. Cornerstone’s March 10, 2010 press release about the study can be found here, and the study itself can
Securities lawsuits rarely go to trial, but on February 24, 2011, just three months after the last securities suit trial concluded, a Central District of California rendered a verdict on behalf of plaintiffs against the sole trial defendant, the former CEO of the defunct Homestore company. The jury found that the defendant, Stuart H. Wolff
In the long-awaited rulings on the post-trial motions in the Vivendi securities case, Judge Richard Holwell has entered a February 22, 2011 order materially narrowing the plaintiff class based on the U.S. Supreme Court’s holding in Morrison v. National Australia Bank. A copy of Judge Holwell’s opinion, in which he eliminated ordinary shareholders