Institute for Legal Reform

When Congress enacted the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act (PSLRA) in 1995, it aimed to address perceived abuses in securities class action litigation. Among the ills Congress sought to address was the prevalence in securities litigation at the time of “professional plaintiffs” — that is, repeat players who lent their names to lawyer-driven lawsuits without performing any oversight or monitoring of the litigation or of the lawyers. In the PSLRA, Congress put limits in place to try to curb these frequent filers. The reality is that these limits have not worked. As is well documented in a new paper from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s Institute for Legal Reform entitled “Frequent Filers Revisited: Professional Plaintiffs in Securities Class Actions,” repeat plaintiffs remain an unfortunate feature of securities litigation today, with many of the same ill effects Congress intended to remedy.

The paper, which was written by New York University Law School Professor Stephen Choi, University of Richmond Law School Professor Jessica Erikson, and University of Michigan Law School Professor Adam Pritchard, details the extent of the frequent filer problem in current securities litigation, and proposes a number of reforms to address the issue. The April 21, 2022 paper can be found here.
Continue Reading The Continuing Problem of Frequent Filers in Securities Litigation

As the number and rate of securities class action lawsuit filings has remained at historically high levels over the past three years, there have been renewed calls for securities class action litigation reform, as I have detailed in prior post (for example, here). According to a March 25, 2020 paper by the U.S. Chamber Institute of Legal Reform (ILR), the “broken securities class action system continues out of control” and the need for securities litigation reform remains urgent.  On April 1, 2020, I participated in an ILR event, along with ILR President Harold Kim and Andrew Pincus of the Mayer Brown law firm, entitled “An Update on Securities Litigation,” in which we discussed key recent securities litigation developments and the continuing case for securities litigation reform. The paper can be found here and a video recording of the ILR event can be found here.
Continue Reading The Continuing Case for Securities Litigation Reform

Last fall, the U.S. Chamber Institute for Legal Reform issued a paper detailing the ways in which the U.S. securities class action litigation system is “spinning out of control,” and calling for a renewed wave of securities litigation reform. In a new paper, entitled “Containing the Contagion: Proposals to Reform the Broken Securities Class Action System,” the Institute renews the call for reform and sets out a series of specific proposals intended address the “abuses” the paper identifies. The current securities class action litigation system, according to the paper, is “plainly broken, harming investors and our capital markets.” The Institute’s February 25, 2019 paper can be found here.
Continue Reading U.S. Securities Class Action Litigation: Alarm Bells and Reform Proposals