Contract Attorney Projects Galore … Another “New Wave” Credit Crisis Lawsuit, With More to Come

As has been reported in all the legal media web sites, the tsunami of filed and pending financial meltdown/subprime-related securities cases is still on the rise.  Nobody covers this better, by the way, than Kevin LaCroix at his site The D&O Diary (www.dandodiary.com).  We access his site all the time to track litigations and potential projects.

Now, as Kevin reports, we’ve entered “a dark new phase”.   While prior stages of the crisis generated waves of related litigation, this new phase already has produced its own distinctive round of lawsuits. Quoting Kevin:

“Like the underlying economic circumstances, the new litigation phase also seems darker and more threatening.  As might have been predicted, shareholder lawsuits have already been filed against the directors and officers of some of the most prominent companies caught up in the recent events. For example, on September 15, 2008, Merrill Lynch shareholders filed a complaint in New York state court against the company and certain of its directors and officers alleging that the company’s planned merger with Bank of America is the result of a “flawed process and unconscionable agreement” and that the defendants had breached their fiduciary duties.  [Now we have] credit crisis lawsuits where the defendant companies are not themselves directly affected by credit crisis fallout, but instead suffer from exposure to other companies that have been directly affected. In a litigation example of these circumstances at work, plaintiffs’ lawyers today initiated another securities class action against a company suffering the effects of Lehman Brothers’ collapse”

It takes awhile for these litigations to work their way through to document reviews, but Posse List members on the NYC listserv, Chicago listserv, LA listserv, Florida listservs and other listservs outside of DC have already seen the staffing up of document reviews projects for these financial meltdown/subprime-related securities cases litigation.  We hope It is only a short matter of time before the DC listserv starts to see these litigations yield document reviews.