Broker-Dealer Litigation - Greenberg Traurig LLP

would primarily focus on establishing that certain statements and omissions common to all the
securities offerings constituted material misrepresentations, which is a classic basis for a class
action.
Minneapolis Firefighters’ Relief Ass’n v. Medtronic, Inc., 2011 WL 6962826 (D. Minn. Dec. 12,
2011).
In a putative securities fraud class action, defendant opposed class certification
exclusively on the grounds that the plaintiffs’ counsel were inadequate because they had made
misrepresentations in the amended complaint regarding the testimony of certain confidential
witnesses. The district court rejected the defendant’s argument and certified the class,
concluding that the defendant failed to establish that the amended complaint contained relevant
and substantial misrepresentations. The court deemed the declarations submitted by the
defendant disputing the implications plaintiffs drew from the confidential witness statements
insufficient to warrant finding plaintiffs’ counsel inadequate.
Hodges v. Akeena Solar, Inc., 274 F.R.D. 259 (N.D. Cal. 2011).
Plaintiff-investors filed securities fraud class action and moved for class certification.
The district court granted the motion, holding that all the elements of the Rule 23 analysis were
satisfied. With respect to the predominance prong of Rule 23(b)(3), the court rejected the
defendants’ contention that the fraud-on-the-market presumption could not be used to support
class certification. Though the defendants argued that they could show, using the plaintiffs’ own
expert testimony, that the alleged misrepresentation did not distort the stock price, the court
found that the plaintiffs’ expert did not offer any opinion on the subject of loss causation, and
therefore defendants had not met their burden of eliminating the possibility that a rational jury
could find that the alleged misrepresentations and omissions misled the market.
In re Wash. Mut. Mortg. Backed Sec. Litig., 2011 WL 5027725 (W.D. Wash. Oct. 21, 2011).
In a putative class action under the Securities Act of 1933 brought by investors against
entities that created and sold mortgage-backed securities (“MBS”) alleging that residential
mortgage loans backing the MBS were fundamentally impaired and that investors were mislead
as to the quality of the underwriting of the loans, the plaintiffs moved for class certification. The
district court certified the class, concluding that the proposed plaintiff class of 701 investors was
sufficiently numerous that joinder was impractical, that the named plaintiffs’ claims were typical
of those of the class, that the named plaintiffs were adequate representatives, that common legal
issues existed and predominated over individual questions, and that class action was superior
method of adjudicating the controversy, thus satisfying the requirements of Rule 23(a) and Rule
23(b)(3).
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