It is already well understood that there has been a change in direction at the SEC under the current Trump Administration and SEC Chair Paul Atkins. In a speech earlier this week at the New York Stock Exchange entitled “Revitalizing America’s Markets at 250,” Atkins described the ways in which he thought the agency in recent times has lost its direction, particularly with respect to its public company disclosure requirements. With the stated aim of restoring its original mission, Atkins identified two main public company disclosure reform goals for the agency. He also set out “three pillars” to “make IPOs great again.” Atkins’s IPO-related remarks include brief but noteworthy comments about securities class action litigation reform that have largely been overlooked in the press coverage of his speech.Continue Reading SEC Chair Paul Atkins and Public Company Disclosure 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.
Readers of this blog well know that in recent years there has been 
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, 
If you have not been following the drama surrounding the question of the attorneys’ fees to be paid to class counsel in the State Street foreign currency exchange overcharge case, you will want to read the latest order from District of Massachusetts Judge 
Regular readers of this blog know that the statistics surrounding U.S. securities litigation in recent years are nothing short of alarming, including, for example, both 
When Congress enacted the PSLRA in 1995, one of the goals was to try to deter frivolous litigation. As time has passed, it has also become clear that many of the PSLRA’s procedural reforms also created a structure of incentives for plaintiffs’ lawyers. For example, the PSLRA’s most adequate plaintiff requirement created an incentive for plaintiffs’ lawyers to seek to represent institutional investors. However, according to a recent academic study, with the passage of time, some of the incentives have had a distorted impact, as the incentives motivate plaintiffs’ lawyers to try to get hold of a mega-case “lottery ticket” that will produce a jackpot outcome – for the lawyers. These distortions in turn are creating many of the ills we are now seeing the securities class action litigation arena, justifying, according to the academic authors, another round of securities litigation reform.
Because the lawsuits are so expensive to litigate and to resolve, securities class action litigation has long been the subject of both scrutiny and criticism. However, while the history of concern about securities litigation is long, the case can be made that there has rarely been a time when securities litigation in the U.S. deserves a critical look more than it does now. As has been well-documented