Establishing New Law
Our clients fought—and won—some of 2022’s most important and complex securities fraud cases across the country, making new law and new precedents that help all investors and consumers have their day in court.
FirstEnergy
In 2020, one of the largest bribery schemes in U.S. history broke open when the Ohio Speaker of the House was arrested. His charge – orchestrating a $60 million scheme to bail out the state’s largest publicly traded utility, FirstEnergy Corporation. When the news broke, shareholders lost billions of dollars. Our client, the Los Angeles County Employees Retirement Association, took the lead in holding FirstEnergy accountable, suing on behalf of harmed investors worldwide.
This year, the court issued a strong ruling in favor of investors, turning back the company’s efforts to evade a trial of the case on the merits. The court stated that “[b]ribery is not legal,” and recognized that granting the defense’s request to dismiss the case would be “a great disservice to the statutory rights of shareholders and investors to recover against those who defraud them.” We’re prosecuting this case in federal court in Ohio.
Dell
This year, we achieved a $1 billion recovery in a case in the Delaware Court of Chancery on the eve of trial. This is the largest cash recovery in a breach of fiduciary duty class action in Delaware, and nearly four times the next-largest comparable recovery.
Legal scholars have called the settlement a “historic result.”
Robbins Geller and co-counsel represented the former holders of Dell Technologies, Inc.’s Class V stock – a special class of stock that was intended to track a portion of Dell’s interest in cloud computing and virtualization company VMware, Inc. The suit alleged that defendants Michael Dell, certain directors of Dell Technologies Inc., and private equity firm Silver Lake breached their fiduciary duties to Class V stockholders, and Goldman Sachs aided and abetted those breaches.
In particular, the defendants coerced the Class V stockholders into accepting an unfair transaction in which the Class V shares were exchanged for a combination of cash and stock far below their fair value. As a result, Dell insiders gained a huge windfall at the expense of the stockholders.
Through hard-fought litigation, Robbins Geller and co-counsel uncovered powerful evidence of fiduciary breaches and achieved a record-breaking $1 billion recovery, which is now pending approval by the court.
