Pomerantz Elevates Brian Calandra to Partner

Pomerantz is proud to announce that attorney Brian Calandra has been promoted to Partner. Brian is a member of the Firm’s Securities Litigation Practice and is based in the New York Office.

Brian has extensive experience in securities, antitrust, complex commercial, and white-collar matters in federal and state courts nationwide. Before joining Pomerantz, Brian represented issuers and underwriters in securities class actions involving the financial, telecommunications, real estate, and pharmaceutical industries. He also represented financial institutions in antitrust class actions concerning foreign exchange; supra-national, sub-sovereign and agency bonds; bonds issued by the government of Mexico; and credit card fees.

Since joining Pomerantz in 2019, Brian has helped recover millions of dollars for investors in securities fraud class actions against issuers in the pharmaceutical, cannabis, and interactive technology industries. In 2022, among other actions, Brian led Pomerantz’s securities litigation class actions against DouYu International Holdings Limited, China's largest game-centric live streaming platform, and 22nd Century Group, Inc., a biotechnology company working to genetically engineer reduced-nicotine tobacco products and reduced-THC cannabis-based products.

In DouYu, Brian achieved a $15 million global settlement of securities fraud claims arising out of DouYu’s $775 million debut on the Nasdaq in 2019. Plaintiffs alleged that DouYu withheld information from its IPO investors, including that its virtual currency “Yuchi” and “lucky draw” gifting feature ran afoul of Chinese gambling regulations.

In 22nd Century, Brian and Managing Partner Jeremy A. Lieberman convinced the 2nd Circuit to reverse, in part, a U.S. District Court’s decision to dismiss the plaintiffs’ Complaint with prejudice when the lower court found that defendants had no duty to disclose either the use of paid stock promotions or an SEC investigation into the company. Brian and Jeremy successfully argued that the district court erred because the court overlooked that omitting the existence of the SEC investigation made statements about the accounting weaknesses and defendants’ subsequent denials of the investigation misleading.

Brian has written multiple times on developments in securities law and other topics, including co-authoring an overview of insider trading law and enforcement for Practical Compliance & Risk Management for the Securities Industry, co-authoring an analysis of anti-corruption compliance risks posed by sovereign wealth funds for Risk & Compliance, and authoring an analysis of the effects of the 2005 Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act on women in bankruptcy for the Women’s Rights Law Reporter.

In 2021, Brian was honored as a Super Lawyers® “Top-Rated Securities Litigation Attorney.”

Brian graduated from Rutgers School of Law - Newark in 2009, cum laude, Order of the Coif. While at Rutgers, Brian was co-editor-in-chief of the Women’s Rights Law Reporter and received the Justice Henry E. Ackerson Prize for Distinction in Legal Skills as well as the Carol Russ Memorial Prize for Distinction in Promoting Women’s Rights.