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Full-Text Articles in Law
Working Hard Or Making Work? Plaintiffs' Attorneys Fees In Securities Fraud Class Actions, Stephen J. Choi, Jessica Erickson, A. C. Pritchard
Working Hard Or Making Work? Plaintiffs' Attorneys Fees In Securities Fraud Class Actions, Stephen J. Choi, Jessica Erickson, A. C. Pritchard
Articles
In this article, we study attorney fees awarded in the largest securities class actions: “mega- settlements.” Consistent with prior work, we find larger fee awards but lower percentages in these cases. We also find that courts are more likely to reject or modify fee requests made in connection with the largest settlements. We conjecture that this scrutiny provides an incentive for law firms to bill more hours, not to advance the case, but to help justify large fee awards—“make work.” The results of our empirical tests are consistent with plaintiffs’ attorneys investing more time in litigation against larger companies, with …
Investing In Corporate Procedure, Jessica M. Erickson
Investing In Corporate Procedure, Jessica M. Erickson
Law Faculty Publications
Corporate litigation is in crisis. At the state level, shareholder lawsuits challenging mergers and other corporate decisions are ubiquitous but rarely end with meaningful relief for shareholders. At the federal level, securities class actions are rife with ethical challenges and low-value settlements. Over the last several decades, multiple groups — including judges, legislatures, and corporate boards — have tried to solve this problem, but all have come up short. This Article argues that the solution lies in rewriting the procedural rules that govern corporate lawsuits. New standing requirements would lead to better screening of these claims. Discovery limits and heightened …
Disaggregated Classes, Benjamin P. Edwards
Market Intermediation, Publicness, And Securities Class Actions, Hillary A. Sale, Robert B. Thompson
Market Intermediation, Publicness, And Securities Class Actions, Hillary A. Sale, Robert B. Thompson
Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works
Securities class actions play a crucial, if contested, role in the policing of securities fraud and the protection of securities markets. The theoretical understanding of these private enforcement claims needs to evolve to encompass the broader set of goals that underlie the securities regulatory impulse and the publicness of those goals. Further, a clear grasp of the modern securities class action also requires an updated understanding of how the role of market intermediation in securities transactions has reshaped the realities of securities litigation in public companies and the evolution of the fraud cause of action in the context of open-market …
Optimal Lead Plaintiffs, Elizabeth Chamblee Burch
Optimal Lead Plaintiffs, Elizabeth Chamblee Burch
Scholarly Works
Adequate representation in securities class actions is, at best, an afterthought and, at worst, usurped and subsumed by the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act’s lead-plaintiff appointment process. Once appointed, the lead plaintiff bears a crushing burden: Congress expects her to monitor the attorney, thwart strike suits, and deter fraud, while judges expect her appointment as the “most adequate plaintiff” to resolve intra-class conflicts and adequate-representation problems. But even if she could be all things to all people, the lead plaintiff has little authority to do much aside from appointing lead counsel. Plus, class members in securities-fraud cases have diverse preferences …