Lalo v. Apple, Inc et al

Filing 45

Recommendation that Milberg LLP be Appointed Interim Class Counsel, Submitted Pursuant to 36 Court Order Dated March 15, 2011 filed by Anthony Chiu. (Attachments: # 1 Declaration, # 2 Exhibit A, # 3 Exhibit B, # 4 Exhibit C, # 5 Exhibit D, # 6 Exhibit E, # 7 Exhibit F, # 8 Exhibit G, # 9 Exhibit H, # 10 Exhibit I, # 11 Proposed Order)(Related document(s) 36 ) (Westerman, Jeff) (Filed on 3/25/2011) Modified text on 4/4/2011 (dhm, COURT STAFF).

Lalo v. Apple, Inc et al

Doc. 45 Att. 6

EXHIBIT E

Dockets.Justia.com

OctOber 4, 2010

Barroway Topaz Kessler Meltzer & Check y Berger & Montague y Bernstein Liebhard y Bernstein Litowitz Berger & Grossmann y Grant & Eisenhofer y Hagens Berman Sobol Shapiro y Hausfeld y Labaton Sucharow y Lieff Cabraser Heimann & Bernstein y

Milberg y
istockphoto/filonmar

Phillips & Cohen y Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan

The PlainTiffs'
MiLBErG
The New York firm scored as the top firm for lead counsel participations in 2009. It secured $1.44 billion in total recovery for its clients and achieved 10 settlements. A federal district judge went on record that the firm has "perhaps unrivaled experience in securities class actions."

list

The

verdict in the Vivendi securities case represents nearly of all recoveries reported by Hot List firms.*

NoTEworTHy CaSES

·InreVivendiUniversalS.A.Sec.Litig., No. 02-5571 (S.D.N.Y.). Lead attorneys Matthew Gluck, Michael Spencer. In this rare securities jury verdict, the French media conglomerate was found to have made 57 false or misleading statements concerning its financial status, with the result that Milberg's clients could recover as much as $9.3 billion, which would be the largest jury verdict in the history of securities class action litigation. Vivendi is only one of nine securities class actions since the enactment of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995 to have reached a verdict. ·In re Comverse Tech. Inc. Deriv. Litig., No. 601272/2006 (New York Co., N.Y., Sup. Ct.). Co-lead attorneys Benjamin Kaufman, Neil Fraser. The technology company agreed to pay $62 million to settle this stock-options backdating complaint and to initiate governance reforms, including removal of the offending directors and approval of all equity grants by both the compensation committee and a majority of nonemployee members of the board. Meanwhile, the firm obtained an appellate ruling stripping directors of immunity when there is evidence of selfon the Hot List including Milberg also dealing or poor judgment. ranked in the Top 5 on RiskMetrics' list ·InreInitialPub.OfferingSec.Litig., No. 21 MC 92 (S.D.N.Y.). Lead of firms having the attorney Ariana Tadler, Robert Wallner. Co-lead counsel Barroway Topaz Kessler Meltzer & Check; Bernstein Liebhard; Sirota & Sirota; Stull, Stull & Brody; Wolf Haldenstein Adler Freeman & Herz. Milberg represented more than 300 institutional investors in this epic class action arising from alleged market manipulation during in 2009. the high-tech bubble, serving as plaintiffs' liaison counsel and arguing before the district court. The judge formally signed off on a $586 million settlement.

highest settlement value

* $18.5 billion is the approximate value of 2009-10 verdicts, settlements and recoveries reported by Hot List Firms.
Reprinted with permission from the October 4, 2010 edition of THE NATIONAL LAW JOURNAL © 2010 ALM Media Properties, LLC. All rights reserved. Further duplication without permission is prohibited. For information, contact 877-257-3382, [e-mail] or visit www.almreprints.com. #005-10-10-02

These are the firms to watch
Michael Moline October 5, 2009

Who would have thought we'd be handing out kudos to Milberg LLP three years after firm predecessor Milberg Weiss Bershad & Schulman was indicted for kicking back legal fees to class action plaintiffs? Who would have thought the firm would survive in any way, shape or form -- much less that it would continue scoring significant settlements?

Funny thing about plaintiffs' attorneys: They're a tenacious bunch. Milberg partner Brad Friedman summed up the mindset when the NLJ's Jeff Jeffrey asked him recently why he hadn't jumped ship during the drama.

"I was going to be good and damned if the government was going to chase me out of my firm and away from the people I liked working with," he said.

The other firms we included in this eighth annual National Law Journal Plaintiffs' Hot List didn't tend to have Milberg's kind of problems, but they had plenty to contend with. To name one cause of action, securities class action filings declined by 22.3% during the first half of 2009, according to Stanford Law School's Securities Class Action Clearinghouse. That organization counted 87 filings during the period, compared to 112 in each half of 2008. Of course, 2008 saw a 19% surge in such filings compared to 2007, with almost half targeting -- surprise! -- the financial sector. Financial services firms remain a frequent target this year, representing 66.7% of filings through June. Still, U.S. securities filings during the second quarter fell 11% below the average for the past 12 years. Plaintiffs, the clearinghouse explained, were running out of major financial houses to sue.

We asked our readers to nominate firms in the United States that did exemplary, cutting-edge work on the plaintiffs' side between the summer of 2008 and the summer of 2009. Firms needed at least one significant win and an impressive track record within the previous three to five years. A "significant" win meant prevailing in a bench or jury trial when the stakes were high, meaning that a substantial amount of money was at issue, or that the case could affect the litigation strategy or outcome of similar cases nationally. We also looked for wins that could effect significant social change or civil rights gains. Firms needed to devote at least 50% of their litigation resources to plaintiffs' work.

We don't pretend this is anything but our subjective take on the major players in the plaintiffs' bar. We looked for firms that struck us as representing the bar's best qualities and that demonstrated unusual flair and creativity. We understand that major class litigation is a collaboration and regret that space doesn't permit us to credit every firm that contributed to the cases we highlight here.

Milberg, for example, has been missing from this list since the indictment, even as it continued to score in court. By this time, the firm has purged its ethically-challenged attorneys and otherwise cleaned up its act. Beyond that, it helped win a $750 million recovery in a case alleging accounting shenanigans by Xerox Corp. As Jeffrey explains in his article ["Milberg lives long after all -- and prospers," Page S3], the firm threw lawyers with serious accounting skills at the Xerox files. "It was possible to look at a highly incriminating report and not know you had gold in your hand without some pretty sophisticated knowledge of accounting principles and practices," Friedman said.

Less money but plenty of principle was at stake in litigation undertaken on behalf of an aging cadre of Mexican "braceros," laborers recruited to work in U.S. fields, beginning during World War II. Their employers withheld part of their wages, ostensibly to save it on the workers' behalf, but government-affiliated Mexican banks refused to hand over the money. The challenge against powerful defenses including sovereign immunity scared off the plaintiffs' bar until 2001, when Chicago-based Hughes Socol Piers Resnick & Dym and San Francisco's Lieff Cabraser Heimann & Bernstein joined forces on the workers' behalf.

The team prevailed, regular NLJ contributor Emily Heller reports. But it was a matter of refusing to take "no" for an answer through three -- count 'em -- reversals in federal court. The U.S. government extracted itself from the litigation. The Mexican government and banks finally bowed to moral pressure that the litigation helped to stoke.

"I actually expected, to tell you the truth, at some point that the plaintiffs would just give up because it was so hard, but they never did," U.S. District Judge Charles R. Breyer remarked. [See "Advocates for 'braceros' wore opposition down," Page S4.]

Speaking of tenacity, here's Coughlin Stoia Geller Rudman & Robbins (formerly affiliated with Milberg Weiss; we must note that former partner William Lerach is now in jail for participating in the kickback scheme). The firm took long odds in 2002 that any money it could squeeze out of Enron Corp.'s enablers would cover its litigation expenses in a climate growing ever more hostile to scheme-liability suits. The firm extracted $7.2 billion in settlements and a nice share of $688 million in attorney fees.

"It was the biggest securities fraud going on, and we're the biggest securities class action firm, so we wanted to be involved, even with those risks," Coughlin told the NLJ's Amanda Bronstad. ["Risky investment in Enron case paid dividends." See Page S14.]

Yeah. That's what we're talking about.