In the following guest post, Doug Greene and John McCarrick take a look at the way that securities class action lawsuits settle and make a suggestion of a way for D&O insurers and defense counsel to try to improve settlement outcomes. Doug is the leader of BakerHostetler’s firmwide Securities and Governance Litigation Team. John is the chair of White and Williams’ firmwide Financial Lines Group. A version of this article previously appeared on Law 360. I would like to thank Doug and John for their willingness to allow me to publish their article as a guest post. 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 Doug and John’s article.
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Numerous questions surround the SEC’s new policy requiring enforcement action defendants in “egregious” cases to admit to wrongdoing in order to settle with the agency, rather than simply agreeing to neither admit nor deny the agency’s allegations. As I discussed in a prior post (
The bankruptcy context is particularly ripe for D&O claims, and it also represents a particularly difficult claims context for D&O insurers. Anyone with any doubts about just how complicated bankruptcy claims can be will want to take a look at the settlement that the various concerned parties recently reached in the bankruptcy of defunct Florida
In a sharply worded March 15, 2012 per curiam opinion (
In an interesting twist on a long –running credit-crisis related securities suit, Wells Fargo has agreed to pay $75 million to settle the Wachovia equity investor securities class action lawsuit, even though their suit had been dismissed at the district court level and was on appeal at the time of the settlement. The parties’ November 
A recent negotiated resolution of an FDIC failed bank lawsuit suggests disputes over D&O insurance coverage may represent the real frontline in the failed bank litigation wars. The compromise was reached in the lawsuit the FDIC only recently filed in the District of Arizona involving the failed First National Bank of Nevada. As discussed below
The parties to two of the consolidated subprime-related securities lawsuits pending against Oppenheimer Funds have settled the case for a total of $100 million. This settlement has a number of interesting features, as discussed further below, including in particular aspects of the allocation of the total settlement amount between the two consolidated fund actions. The
In a settlement that has a number of interesting features, Satyam Computer Services, an Indian technology outsourcing company, has agreed to pay $125 million to settle the consolidated securities class action litigation pending against the company in Southern District of New York.
Even after two years, the Madoff scandal continues to fascinate. Following close on the heels of last week’s news of 
There is a reason that when class action settlements are announced, they are described as preliminary and subject to final approval – sometimes the settlements fall apart before the case is finally put to rest. That appears be what has happened with the Schwab YieldPlus subprime-related securities class action lawsuit.