Large, well-funded corporations are poised to assume a new role in securities litigation: victims of deception.  So predicts Perkins Coie partner Patrick Collins, who told The National Law Journ, “We are hearing from sophisticated corporate plaintiffs who claim they were not told all the material facts.”  According to Collins, this type of claim had previously been the province of “unsophisticated individual investors” and pursued through class actions. It is much more difficult for major corporations, with their huge investments of time and money in due diligence, to claim they were simply hoodwinked.  Yet two recent cases —BP v. Northern Trust and Bank of America v. Bear Stearns—as possible harbingers of an era where financial institutions will face suits from plaintiffs in their own weight division—not just from Mom & Pop investors bound together in a certified class.  It can’t be of any solace to Bill Lerach as he sits in federal prison, but it would be some irony if the arguments he perfected during his reign as Corporate America’s “King of Pain” end up being employed by his old targets.

                                                                                -posted by brian

Bill Lerach and his hair