Pomerantz: Securities Practice Group of 2018
\Pomerantz earned a place on Law360’s coveted list of Securities Practice Groups of the Year for 2018. In its announcement, Law360 credited the firm’s stunning $3 billion win for investors in Petrobras securities as one of the reasons for this accolade. According to Law360, which interviewed Managing Partner Jeremy Lieberman pursuant to the award:
Pomerantz attorneys were able to achieve this result, as well as an $80 million settlement resolving investor allegations involving Yahoo data breaches, by focusing much of their efforts on proving damages, said managing partner Jeremy Lieberman. For the Petrobras case, investors ultimately alleged what they called an “unprecedented” 21 corrective disclosures revealing the fraud, and Lieberman said he personally spent about 500 hours with their damages expert.
“It was really understanding the damages and … putting defendants on the defensive and saying: Listen if you don’t pay us large settlements, you’re going to be in front of a jury and they’re not going to like to hear about some company involved in a massive fraud and kickback scheme,” Lieberman said.
The Petrobras deal represented the biggest securities class action settlement in a decade and the biggest-ever in a class action involving a foreign issuer, according to Pomerantz. … The class action settlement represented a 65 percent premium to the recoveries the individual plaintiffs secured, according to court documents.
“That’s really a unique, once-in-a-generation result where you’ll have the class do better than the opt-outs,” Lieberman said. “And it wasn’t by accident.”
Law360 further ascribed Pomerantz’s top standing to the precedent-setting rulings in Petrobras that the firm achieved in the Second Circuit Court of Appeals. The three-judge panel rejected Petrobras’ bid for a heightened standard when determining whether a class is ascertainable, or identifiable, and also rejected Petrobras’ argument that the investors should have been required to show that the stock increased in response to positive news and declined in response to negative news. As Jeremy Lieberman has stated, “These favorable decisions will form the bedrock of securities class action litigation for decades to come.”