Milberg Weiss goes strong
When the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act was enacted in 1995, some observers thought the law would put New York’s Milberg Weiss Bershad Hynes & Lerach-and especially partner William Lerach, the lawyer corporate executives love to hate-out of business. Instead, says a new study by Stanford Law School’s Securities Class Action Clearinghouse and Cornerstone Research, Milberg Weiss is doing better than ever. The study found that the 200-lawyer firm has served as lead or co-lead plaintiffs’ counsel in more than half of all securities class actions settled since the law was enacted. The list of suits in which the firm is involved reads like a Who’s Who of corporate wrongdoing, including the Enron Corp., Tyco International Ltd. and ImClone Systems Inc. cases, and the case that could be the biggest of them all, the class action accusing Wall Street investment banks of illegally rigging more than 300 initial public offerings. Ironically, securities lawyers attribute much of the firm’s success directly to the 1995 reform act, which created a more concentrated securities plaintiffs’ bar dominated by big firms that can afford to spend the huge sums necessary to investigate and prosecute these cases.
