Legal News

Which Firm Made the Most in Securities Class-Actions Last Year?

By Vanessa O'Connell

Since the criminal prosecution of Milberg Weiss, we've wondered who would emerge to become the dominant player in shareholder class-action litigation.

Securities Class Action Services, which does research for institutional investors and other parties, recently provided some possible clues, in its ranking of law firms by the by the total dollar amount of final securities class action settlements. (Disclosure: SCAS counts some law firms as clients)

Bernstein Litowitz Berger & Grossmann, the firm that brought fraud suits against AIG, Lehman Brothers, and Washington Mutual in the wake of the financial crisis, topped the SCAS’s recent ranking of plaintiffs firms by settlement value, with 16 settlements totaling $999.9 million in 2010. Here's the full report.

Luke Green, a vice president at SCAC, said that in 2010, no firms in the SCAC ranking saw more than $1 billion in settlements. In 2009, three firms had surpassed that mark.

"Maybe settlement dollars are being more evenly distributed among the different firms," Green told us. "It's not necessarily that overall settlement dollars were lower."

On his blog, Green noted that a variety of research shops have cited the relative decline in federal securities class action filings in the past year.

Bernstein Litowitz Berger & Grossmann represents most of the institutional investors that opted out of the record $624 million class action settlement last year on behalf of shareholders of Countrywide Financial Corp.

In 2009, the law firm had been in eighth place in the SCAC ranking. One of its 2010 settlements included the $200 million Wellcare Securities Litigation settlement.

With only 54 lawyers, the firm is much smaller than such rivals such as Robbins Geller Rudman & Dowd, and files far fewer cases than many of its competitors, according to this item in AmLaw Litigation Daily.

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on March 25, 2011 (boomark / email).