In the following guest post, Ed Whitworth, the Head of Directors and Officers Liability at Inigo, and Yera Patel, Head of Casualty & Financial Lines Claims and Analytics for Inigo, summarize the results of a recent survey Inigo conducted of U.S. securities litigation defense counsel. The original of the survey summary previously was published on Inigo’s blog, here. I would like to thank Ed, Yera, and Inigo for allowing me to publish the report summary on this site. I welcome guest post submissions from responsible authors on topics of interest to the blog’s readers. Please contact me directly if you would like to submit a guest post. Here is the authors’ article.
**********************Continue Reading Guest Post: Inigo’s 2023 Defense Counsel Survey
Nikola, the electric vehicle company that became a publicly traded company through a June 3, 2020 merger with a SPAC, has reached an agreement to pay $125 million to settle proceedings the SEC brought against the company relating to misrepresentations its former CEO Trevor Milton and the company made about the company’s EV production capabilities. In the settlement, the company neither admitted nor denied the SEC’s allegations. The SEC’s December 21, 2021 press release about the settlement can be found 
By almost any measure, Fiscal Year 2021 (ended September 30, 2021) was a watershed year in the history of the SEC’s Whistleblower program. According to the recently published annual report of the SEC’s Whistleblower Office, during FY 2021 the agency made the highest annual number of awards in the history of the program, both in terms of dollars and individuals awarded. Indeed, during FY 2021 the agency made more whistleblower awards than in all of the program’s prior years combined. The SEC’s Office of the Whistleblower’s November 15, 2021 Report to Congress can be found 
From the outset of his time in office, SEC Chair 
As I discussed in a post at the time (
As the pandemic has progressed and as time has passed, one question I am regularly asked is whether we will continue to see COVID-19 related legal actions being filed. If the latest SEC action is any indication, we have not yet seen the last of new COVID-19-related suit filings. On August 17, 2021, the agency filed a civil enforcement action against an Ohio biotech firm claiming that the firm made false claims about one of its products, as a way to suggest that the firm was positioned to profit from the coronavirus outbreak. A copy of the agency’s complaint can be found 
In the agency’s latest move underscoring its emphasis on cybersecurity disclosure, the SEC has filed settled charges against the U.K. educational publishing and services company Pearson plc, alleging that the company misled investors about a 2018 data breach. The company, which neither admitted nor denied the charges, agreed to pay a $1 million civil money penalty. The administrative enforcement action, while not the first of its type, does highlight the agency’s heightened focus on cybersecurity disclosure issues. The agency’s August 16, 2021 cease and desist order can be found 
Even though the worst of the pandemic crisis in the U.S. appears, at least for now, to be past, the threat of COVID-19-related claims continues. In the latest example of the continuing COVID-19-related claim threat, the SEC has initiated a COVID-19-related enforcement action against a California-based digital health care company that had made claims early in the coronavirus outbreak about the company’s ability to profit from the outbreak. The SEC’s new action is a reminder that the threat of new COVID-19-related claims is ongoing. A copy of the SEC’s July 7, 2021 complaint against Parallax Health Sciences, Inc. can be found 
The number of SEC and PCAOB accounting and auditing enforcement actions decreased in 2020 relative to 2019, but monetary settlements increased year-over year, according to a recent report from Cornerstone Research. The report, entitled “Accounting and Auditing Enforcement Activity – 2020 Review and Analysis” (
In what is, according to the SEC itself, the second-largest whistleblower award in the history of the agency’s whistleblower program, the SEC has awarded two joint whistleblowers a bounty of over $50 million. The agency’s order making the award is heavily redacted, in order to protect the whistleblowers’ identities, so it is hard to tell very much about the circumstances surrounding the award. But the award is the latest in what has been a recent flurry of very large whistleblower awards by the agency. The SEC’s April 15, 2021 press release announcing the award can be found