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Sarah Abrams

In the following guest post, Sarah Abrams considers the potential D&O liability and insurance implications of a class action lawsuit Meta’s social media platform users recently brought against the company alleging that advertisements on the company’s sites enabled a stock manipulation scheme. Sarah is Head of Claims Baleen Specialty, a division of Bowhead Specialty. I would like to thank Sarah for allowing me to publish her article as a guest post on this site. I welcome guest post submissions from responsible authors on topics of interest to this site’s readers. Please contact me directly if you would like to submit a guest post. Here is Sarah’s article.Continue Reading Guest Post: When Fraud Leads to Fraud

Sarah Abrams

Last fall the U.S. Supreme Court dismissed, as improvidently granted, the writ of certiorari in two pending securities lawsuits, including in the Meta Platforms/Facebook case (as discussed here). The Court’s dismissal of the writ of certiorari in the Facebook case had obvious implications for the immediate litigants in the case, as it left the prior circuit court ruling standing. But the dismissal also has important implications for litigants in other cases involving the same issues as were raised in the Facebook case.

In the following guest post, Sarah Abrams, Head of Claims Baleen Specialty, a division of Bowhead Specialty, considers the implication for those other litigants in those other cases in light of the Supreme Court’s dismissal of the writ of certiorari in the Facebook case. I would like to thank Sarah for allowing me to publish her article as a guest post on this site. I welcome guest post submissions from responsible authors in topics of interest to this site’s readers. Please contact me directly if you would like to submit a guest post. Here is Sarah’s article.Continue Reading Guest Post: Location, Location, Location

The current Supreme Court term promised to be an interesting one from a securities law standpoint, as the Court had agreed to take up two cases dealing with key securities class action litigation issues. One of those cases is the securities case involving the Facebook/Cambridge Analytica’s user data scandal. The Facebook case would have required the Court to address an important and recurring disclosure related issue. However, on November 22, 2024, the Court issued a single-line order stating that “the writ of certiorari is dismissed as improvidently granted,” meaning that the Supreme Court’s consideration of the Facebook case will now not go forward, and the Ninth Circuit’s ruling in the case, in which the appellate court reversed in part the district court’s dismissal of the case, will now stand. A copy of the Supreme Court’s November 22, 2024, order can be found here.Continue Reading U.S. Supreme Court Dismisses Facebook Case, Saying Writ Improvidently Granted

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