Category Archives: All The News That’s Fit To Blog

A few items from around the web.

(1) RiskMetrics has released its annual SCAS 50 report of the top 50 plaintiffs’ law firms ranked by the total dollar amount of final securities class action settlements occurring in 2007 in which the law firm served as lead or co-lead counsel.

(2) The Federalist Society has posted an online debate on the Stoneridge decision on scheme liability. Participants include Professor Stephen Bainbridge, Professor Jay Brown, and AEI’s Ted Frank.

(3) Amanda Rose, an incoming Vanderbilt law professor, has issued an interesting working paper on securities class actions. Rose argues that the overdeterrence threat of securities class actions could be mitigated if “policymakers adopt an oversight approach to securities litigation reform by, for example, granting the SEC the ability to screen which Rule 10b-5 class actions may be filed, and against whom.”

Big news in the long-running Coca-Cola securities class action. As previously posted in The 10b-5 Daily, the defendants have sought the denial of class certification based on alleged misconduct by lead counsel for the plaintiffs. In a report issued this week, the special master considering the issue agreed with the defendants. The report found that lead counsel engaged in improper conduct when it paid a former Coca-Cola employee to provide the plaintiffs with stolen company documents. The special master’s recommendation that lead counsel be barred from serving as class counsel is subject to approval by the district court judge. Legal Pad has an extensive post on the decision, including a link to the report.

Quote of note (Special Master’s Report and Recommendation): “Ordinarily, in the absence of any reason to suspect class counsel of inappropriate conduct, courts must assume that class counsel will properly and candidly discharge these duties. Here, however, the Court is faced with a very unusual situation in which Class Counsel engaged in extremely troubling conduct by paying for documents stolen from Coke, and then exacerbated the conclusions to be drawn from that initial conduct by refusing to accept responsibility for that conduct and by continuing, to this day, to defend that conduct through the use of arguments that appear to be pretextual. The administration of justice would be prejudiced should the court turn a blind eye to these circumstances.”

Will the “Securities Litigation Attorney Accountability and Transparency Act” finally gain some traction? It’s doubtful. Initially introduced in 2006 after the Milberg Weiss indictment, the legislation would permit fee shifting for successful defendants at the discretion of the court, require the disclosure of conflicts of interest between a plaintiff and his attorney, and allow courts to approve lead counsel through a competitive bidding process. SecuritiesLaw360 reports (subscrip. req’d) that the bill was reintroduced last week with support from House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio).

(1) Lyle Roberts (the author of The 10b-5 Daily) and Jonathan Miller have a column in the Feb. 8, 2008 edition of the New York Law Journal on the collective scienter theory. The column (subscrip. req’d) discusses the Dynex Capital and Tellabs II decisions.

(2) Securities Litigation Watch is keeping a close tab on securities class action filings. January 2008 was a big month, with at least 20 new filings (and not all of them subprime related).

(3) Professor Stephen Bainbridge posts his remarks on “Stoneridge and Capital Markets Policy” from an ABA panel presentation today.

The Apollo Group securities class action trial ended with a plaintiffs’ verdict. A couple of news articles – from Portfolio.com and The Legal Intelligencer (Jan. 31, 2008 edition – subscrip. req’d) – offer some more background on what happened.

Quote of note (Portfolio.com): “While this might sound like the perfect case for the defense to rush to settle, that did not happen. At one point, there was a confidential mediation, but it went nowhere, says [plaintiffs’ counsel]. ‘They made it abundantly clear to us that they had every intention of trying this case to verdict,’ he says. ‘We had no intention of caving, we would never cave, and we made it abundantly clear we try cases to verdict.'”

The author of The 10b-5 Daily, Lyle Roberts (Dewey & LeBoeuf), is participating in a Practicing Law Institute audio webcast on the U.S. Supreme Court’s recent Stoneridge decision. The webcast will take place on Thursday, January 31 at 1 p.m. ET and CLE credit is available. Click here to register.

As it turns out, trials remain a risky business for both plaintiffs and defendants. Any thoughts that the JDS Uniphase defense verdict would lead to more securities class action trials will have to be tempered by yesterday’s result in the Apollo Group trial. Bloomberg reports that the jury returned a plaintiff verdict that could lead to a payout of up to $277.5 million in damages.

Interestingly, the company has a web page on the litigation that includes a case summary, key documents, and a timeline of events. Comprehensive coverage of the trial and the jury verdict can be found at Securities Litigation Watch and The D&O Diary.

Two items of interest:

(1) Texas billionaire Sam Wyly’s litigation over the settlement in the Computer Associates securities class action has hit a slight bump. The court decision giving Wyly access to the work product of the lead counsel in the Computer Associates case has been on appeal in New York state court. The New York Law Journal reports that the appellate court has overruled the earlier decision, finding that an absent class member does not have the same right to lawyers’ files as a client in a traditional attorney-client relationship. Wyly’s attorney states that Wyly plans to appeal the decision and, in any event, will be able to obtain the material as part of his ongoing legal malpractice suit against the plaintiffs’ firms.

(2) Was the JDS Uniphase case a harbinger of success for defendants in securities class action trials? We should know soon. According to Securities Litigation Watch, a verdict in the Apollo Group trial could be reached today.

The New York Law Journal (subscrip. req’d) has two interesting columns this week discussing developments in the pleading of securities fraud.

(1) Lower Court’s Handling of Tellabs’ “Inference of Scienter” (Dec. 11) discusses how courts have addressed the PSLRA’s scienter pleading standard in the aftermath of the Supreme Court’s Tellabs decision earlier this year. After summarizing the relevant decisions, the authors conclude that Tellabs has made it more difficult to survive a motion to dismiss based on a “post-Tellabs trend that corporate investigations, revisions, and restatements do not necessarily support a sufficiently compelling inference of scienter.”

Quote of note: “The early returns suggest a significant change in how lower courts are addressing scienter issues in 12(b)(6) motions in Section 10(b) private civil cases. As one court aptly stated, the analysis required by Tellabs ‘is akin to holding a minitrial on the merits of the case based only on the complaint.'”

(2) Group Pleading Suffers Another Blow (Dec. 13) addresses the varying court decisions on whether the “group pleading doctrine,” which permits the attribution of alleged misstatements in group-published documents to corporate officers without specific factual allegations about their respective involvement in the misstatements, has survived the passage of the PSLRA. As the authors note, some courts (especially the S.D.N.Y.) have drawn a distinction between group pleading for purposes of attributing misstatements (permitted) and group pleading for purposes of establishing the existence of a strong inference of scienter (not permitted). Other courts, most notably the Third Circuit in its recent decision in Winer Family Trust v. Queen, 503 F.3d 319 (3rd Cir. 2007), have rejected the distinction as “illogical” given that it requires a heightened pleading of scienter for an act that the defendant is only presumed to have committed.

Quote of note: “The issue may yet reach the Supreme Court. At present, there is only a latent conflict among the circuits, as no circuit court has expressly held that group pleading is still permissible despite the PSLRA. Nonetheless, many district courts, particularly in the Second Circuit, have continued to apply the doctrine. It is difficult to predict where the Second Circuit would come out on this issue, given its silence to date. However, if it were to adopt the prevailing view of its district courts, that would create a clear conflict between circuit court holdings, which could send the issue to the Supreme Court.”

Whether the plaintiffs in a securities class action should be required to disclose the identities of their confidential witnesses as part of the discovery process is an issue that continues to be the subject of litigation. The 10b-5 Daily had a post last year about an E.D. of Pa. decision in which the court held that the defendants were entitled to the names of all individuals known by the plaintiff to have relevant knowledge, but the plaintiff was not required to specifically identify the confidential witnesses relied upon in the complaint. The court did note, however, that it would consider revisiting its decision if the defendants were presented with an overwhelming list of names.

How many names would be “overwhelming”? A court in the N.D. of Cal. has an answer: 77. In In re Harmonic, Inc. Sec. Litig., 245 F.R.D. 424 (N.D. Cal. 2007), the court found the only effect of allowing the plaintiffs to withhold the names of the five confidential witnesses relied upon in the complaint would be “to force the Defendants to expend resources on taking the depositions of 77 people [i.e., the witnesses identified in the plaintiffs’ initial disclosures] in order to obtain the information.” The court also rejected the plaintiffs’ argument that the names of their confidential witnesses were protected work product, noting that the information would “inevitably come to light.”

Holding: Motion to compel answers to interrogatories concerning confidential witnesses granted.