David Kaplan
Lane Arnold

One of the most important aspects of class action litigation in the U.S. is the right of individuals to “opt out” of the class. However, as discussed in the following guest post from David Kaplan and Lane Arnold, a series of recent developments has significantly complicated the decision-making framework for prospective opt outs. Kaplan is a Director at Saxena White P.A. and co-head of the firm’s Direct Action practice.  Arnold is a Senior Director – Legal at the University of Texas/Texas A&M Investment Management Company (UTIMCO).  This article was originally written and published in the April edition of The NAPPA Report.  I would like to thank Dave and Lane for allowing me to publish their article 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 Dave and Lane’s article.
Continue Reading Guest Post: Protecting Securities Fraud Recoveries: Investors Face a Catch-22

As I have detailed in prior posts on this blog, securities class action litigation is well-established in Australia. According to a recent report from ISS Securities Class Action Services, securities class action litigation has grown “markedly” in the last ten years, to the point that outside North America, Australia “is the jurisdiction in which a corporation is most likely to find itself defending against a class action,” and indeed other than the U.S., Australia “is pulling ahead of almost all other countries in terms of active securities class action cases before the courts.” There are however important differences between the Australian and U.S. class action systems, and some of these difference post important challenges for both the courts and for litigants – and indeed have led to calls for reform. The October 23, 2018 report, entitled “Navigating the Australian Securities Class Action Landscape,” can be found here.
Continue Reading The Challenging Securities Litigation Landscape in Australia

The highest-profile attempt to utilize the new U.K. regime for consumer class actions has come to a grinding halt. The case involved a claim alleging that MasterCard’s fee structure had resulted in overcharges to tens of millions of U.K. consumers. On July 21, 2017, the Competition Appeal Tribunal, newly re-organized to oversee the consumer class action regime, declined to grant the necessary collective proceedings order that would have allowed the action to go forward. The tribunal’s ruling is highly fact-specific and its decision to decline the collective proceedings order very much reflects the specific features of the claims against MasterCard, but the ruling nevertheless does raise concerns about the viability of the class action regime and its attractiveness to prospective claimants in other cases. A copy of the Tribunal’s July 21, 2017 order can be found here.
Continue Reading U.K. Court Halts Effort to Use New Opt-Out Class Action Procedures

The subprime litigation wave has been rolling along for well over a  year, so it might be expected that by now we have seen many of the likely litigation variations. I suspect there are hosts of new variations yet to come, but the most recent subprime-related lawsuits are substantially similar to prior lawsuits. Yet each